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LATEST LITERARY ESSAYS 
AND ADDRESSES 



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NOTE. 

The publication in a volume of the following 
Essays and Addresses is in accordance with the in- 
tention of their author. Most of them had been 
revised by him with this end in view. The only 
one of them concerning which there is a doubt, 
whether he would have published it in its present 
form, is the paper on " Richard III." With this 
he was not satisfied, and he proposed to revise it. 
It has seemed to me, however, of interest enough 
as it stands to warrant its publication. 

CHARLES ELIOT NORTON. 

Cambbidgb, Massachusetts, 
16 November, 1891. 



CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

Gkay 1 

Some Letters of Walter Savage Landor ... 43 

Waxton 57 

Milton's " Areopagitica " ...... 94 

Shakespeare's " Richard III ."...». Ill 

The Study of Modern Languages .... 1.31 

The Progress op the World 160 



LATEST LITERARY ESSAYS AND 
ADDRESSES. 



GRAY. 

1886. 



The eighteentli century, judged by the literature 
it produced everywhere in Europe outside of Ger- 
many and France, is generally counted inferior to 
that which preceded and to that which followed it. 
A judgment of especial severity has been passed 
upon its poetry by critics who lost somewhat of 
their judicial equipoise in that enthusiasm of the 
romantic reaction which replaced the goddess of 
good taste by her of liberty, and crowned the judi- 
cial wig with the Phrygian cap. The poetry of the 
period fell under a general condemnation as alto- 
gether wanting in the imaginative quality, and as 
being rather the conclusions of the understanding 
put into verse than an attempt to express, however 
inadequately, the eternal longings and intuitions 
and experiences of human nature. These find their 
vent, it was thought, in those vivid flashes of phrase, 
the instantaneous bolts of passionate conception, 
whose furrow of splendor across the eyeballs of the 
mind leaves them momentarily dark to the outward 
universe, only to quicken their vision of inward and 



2 GRAY 

incommunicable things. There was some truth in 
this criticism, as there commonly is in the harsh 
judgments of imperfect sympathy, but it was far 
from being the whole truth. 

If poesy be, as the highest authority has defined 
it, a divine madness, no English poet and no 
French one between 1700 and 1800 need have 
feared a writ de lunatico mquirendo. They talk, 
to be sure, of " sacred rages," but in so decorous a 
tone that we do not even glance towards the tongs. 
They invoke fire from heaven in such frozen verse 
as would have set it at defiance had their prayer 
been answered. Cowper was really mad at inter- 
vals, but his poetry, admirable as it is in its own 
middle-aged way, is in need of anything rather 
than of a strait-waistcoat. A certain blight of 
propriety seems to have fallen on all the verse of 
that age. The thoughts, wived with words above 
their own level, are always on their good behavior, 
and we feel that they would have been happier in 
the homelier unconstraint of prose. Diction was 
expected to do for imagination what only imagi- 
nation could do for it, and the magic which was 
personal to the magician was supposed to reside in 
the formula. 

Dryden died with his century ; and nothing 
can be more striking than the contrast between 
him, the last of the ancient line, and the new race 
which succeeded him. In him, too, there is an 
element of prose, an alloy of that good sense so 
admirable in itself, so incapable of those indiscre- 
tions which make the charm of poetry. His power 



GEAY , 3 

of continuous thinking shows his mind of a differ- 
ent quality from those whose thought comes as 
lightning, intermittently it may be, but lightning, 
mysterious, incalculable, the more unexpected that 
we watch fdr it, and generated by forces we do 
not comprehend. Yet Dryden at his best is won- 
derfully impressive. He reminds one of a boiling 
spring. There is tumult, concussion, and no little 
vapor ; but there is force, there is abundance, there 
is reverberation, and we feel that elemental fire is 
at work, though it be of the earth earthy. But 
what strikes us most in him, considered intellectu- 
ally, is his modernness. Only twenty-three years 
younger than Milton, he belongs to another world. 
Milton is in many respects an ancient. Words- 
worth says of him that 

" His soul was a star and dwelt apart." 

But I should rather be inclined to say that it was 
his mind that was alienated from the present. In- 
tensely and even vehemently engaged in the ques- 
tion of the day, his politics were abstract and 
theoretic, and a quotation from Sophocles has as 
much weight with him as a constitutional precedent. 
His intellectual sympathies were Greek. His lan- 
guage even has caught the accent of the ancient 
world. When he makes our English search her 
coffers round, it is not for any home-made orna- 
ments, and his commentators are fain to unravel 
some of his syntax by the help of the Greek or 
Latin grammar. 

Dryden knew Latin literature very well, but 



4 GRA Y 

that innate scepticism of his mind, which made 
him an admirable critic, would not allow him to be 
subjugated by antiquity. His ?esthetical training 
was essentially French ; and if this sometimes had 
an iU effect on his poetry, it was greatly to the 
advantage of his prose, wherein ease and dignity 
are combined in that happy congruity of propor- 
tion which we call style, and the scholar's fulness 
of mind is mercifully tempered by the man of the 
world's dread of being too fiercely in earnest. It 
is a gentlemanlike style, thoroughbred in every 
fibre. As it was without example, so, I think, it 
has remained without a parallel in English. Swift 
has the ease, but lacks the lift; and Burke, who 
plainly formed himself on Dry den, has matched 
him in splendor, but has not caught his artistic skill 
in gradation, nor that perfection of tone which can 
be eloquent without being declamatory. 

When I try to penetrate the secret of Dryden's 
manner, I seem to discover that the new quality in 
it is a certain air of good society, an urbanity, in 
the original meaning of the word. By this I mean 
that his turn of thought (I am speaking of his 
maturer works) is that of the capital, of the great 
world, as it is somewhat presumptuously called, and 
that his diction is, in consequence, more conversa- 
tional than that which had been traditional with 
any of the more considerable poets who had pre- 
ceded him. It is hard to justify a general impres- 
sion by conclusive examples. Two instances will 
serve to point my meaning, if not wholly to jus- 
tify my generalization. His ode on the death of 
Mrs. KiUigrew begins thus : — 



GRAY 5 

" Thou youngest Tirgin-daughter of the skies, 
Made in the last promotion of the blest." 

And in his translation of the third book of the 
"^neid," he describes Achaemenides, the Greek res- 
ciied by the Trojans from the island of the Cyclops, 
as " bolting " from the woods. 

Dry den, in making verse the vehicle of good 
sense and argmnent rather than of passion and in- 
tuition, affords but an indication of the tendency 
of the time in which he lived, — a tendency quick- 
ened by the influence which could not fail to be 
exerted by his really splendid powers as a poet, es- 
pecially by the copious felicity of his language and 
his fine instinct for the energies and harmonies of 
rhythm. But the fact that a great deal of his work 
was job-work, that most of it was done in a hm^ry, 
led him often to fill up a gap with the first sono- 
rous epithet that came to hand, and his indolence 
was thus partly to blame for that poetic diction 
which brought poetry to a deadlock in the next 
century. Dryden knew very well that sound makes 
part of the sense and a large part of the sentiment 
of a verse, and, where he is in the vein, few poets 
have known better than he how to conjure with 
vowels, or to beguile the mind into acquiescence 
through the ear. Addison said truly, though in 
verses whose see-saw cadence and lack of musical 
instinct would have vexed the master's ear : — 

" Great Dryden next, whose tuneful Muse affords 
The sweetest numbers and the fittest words.' ' 

But Dryden never made the discovery that ten syl- 
lables arranged in a proper accentual order were 



6 GRAY 

all that was needful to make a ten-syllable verse. 
He is great Dryden, after all, and between bim and 
Wordsworth there was no poet with enough energy 
of imagination to deserve that epithet. But he had 
taught the trick of cadences that made the manu- 
facture of verses more easy, and he had brought 
the language of poetry nearer, not to the language 
of real life as Wordsworth understood it, that is, 
to the speech of the people, but to the language of 
the educated and polite. He himself tells us at the 
end of the " Religio Laici : " — 

" And this unpolislied, rugged verse I chose 
As fittest for discourse, and nearest prose." 

Unpolished and rugged the verse certainly was not, 
nor in his hands could ever be. It is the thought 
that has an irresistible attraction for prosaic phrase, 
and coalesces with it in a stubborn precipitate which 
will not become ductile to the poetic form. 

Dryden perfected the English rhymed heroic 
verse by giving it a variety of cadence and pomp 
of movement which it had never had before. 
Pope's epigrammatic cast of thought led him to 
spend his skill on bringing to a nicer adjustment 
the balance of the couplet, in which he succeeded 
only too wearisomely well. Between them they re- 
duced versification in their favorite measure to the 
precision of a mechanical art, and then came the 
mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease. Through 
the whole eighteenth century the artificial school of 
poetry reigned by a kind of undivine right over a 
public which admired — and yawned. This public 
seems to have listened to its poets as it did to its 



GRA r 7 

preachers, satisfied that all was orthodox if only 
they heard the same thing- over again every time, 
and believing the pentameter couplet a part of the 
British Constitution. And yet it is to the credit of 
that age to have kept alive the wholesome tradition 
that Writing, whether in prose or verse, was an 
Art that required training, at least, if nothing more, 
in those who assumed to practise it. 

Burke thought it impossible to draw an indict- 
ment against a whole people, and the remark is 
equally just if we apply it to a century. It is true 
that with the eighteenth a season of common sense 
set in with uncommon severity, and such a season 
acts like a drought upon the springs of poesy. To 
be sure, an unsentimental person might say that 
the world can get on much better without the finest 
verses that ever were written than without common 
sense, and I am willing to admit that the question 
is a debatable one, and to compromise upon uncom- 
mon sense whenever it is to be had. Let us admit 
that the eighteenth century was, on the whole, pro- 
saic, yet it may have been a pretty fair one as cen- 
turies go. " 'T is hard to find a whole age to imi- 
tate, or what century to propose for example," says 
wise Sir Thomas Browne. Every age is as good as 
the people who live in it choose or can contrive to 
make it, and, if good enough for them, perhaps 
we, who had no hand in the making of it, can 
complain of it only so far as it had a hand in 
the making of us. Perhaps even our own age, 
with its marvels of applied science that have made 
the world more prosily comfortable, will loom less 



8 GRAY 

gigantic than now througli the prospective of the 
future. Perhaps it will even be found that the 
telephone, of which we are so proud, cannot carry 
human speech so far as Homer and Plato have 
contrived to carry it with their simpler appliances. 
As one grows older, one finds more points of half- 
reluctant sympathy with that undysj)eptic and 
rather worldly period, much in the same way as one 
grows to find a keener savor in Horace and Mon- 
taigne. In the first three quarters of it, at least, 
there was a cheerfulness and contentment with 
thmgs as they were, which is no unsound philosophy 
for the mass of mankind, and which has been im- 
possible since the first French Revolution. For our 
own War of Independence, though it gave the first 
impulse to that awful riot of human nature turned 
loose among first principles, was but the reassertion 
of established precedents and traditions, and essen- 
tially conservative in its aim, however deflected in 
its course. It is true that, to a certain extent, the 
theories of the French doctrinaires gave a tinge to 
the rhetoric of our patriots, but it is equally true 
that they did not perceptibly affect the conclusions 
of our Constitution-makers. Nor had those doctri- 
naires themselves any suspicion of the explosive 
mixture that can be made by the conjunction of ab- 
stract theory with brutal human instinct. Before 
1789 there was a delightful period of miiversal 
confidence, during which a belief in the perfecti- 
bility of man was insensibly merging into a convic- 
tion that he could be perfected by some formula of 
words, just as a man is knighted. He kneels down 



GRA Y 9 

a simple man like ourselves, is told to rise up a 
Perfect Being, and rises accordingly. It certainly 
was a comfortable time. If there was discontent, 
it was in the individual, and not in the air ; spo- 
radic, not epidemic. The discomfort of Cowper 
was not concerning this world but the worldpto come. 
Men sate as roomily in their consciences as in the 
broad-bottomed chairs which suggest such solidity 
of repose. ResjJonsibility for the Universe had 
not yet been invented. A few solitary persons saw 
a swarm of ominous question-marks wherever they 
turned their eyes ; but sensible people pronounced 
them the mere muscce volitantes of indigestion 
which an honest dose of rhubarb would disperse. 
Men read Rousseau for amusement, and never 
dreamed that those flowers of rhetoric were ripen- 
ing the seed of the guillotine. Post and telegraph 
were not so importimate as now. People were 
not compelled to know what all the fools in the 
world were saying or doing yesterday. It is im- 
possible to conceive of a man's enjoying now the 
unconcerned seclusion of White at Selborne, who, a 
century ago, recorded the important fact that " the 
old tortoise at Lewes in Sussex awakened and came 
forth out of his dormitory," but does not seem to 
have heard of Burgoyne's surrender, the news of 
which ought to have reached him about the time he 
was writing. It may argue pusillanimity, but I can 
hardly help envying the remorseless indifference of 
such men to the burning questions of the hour, at 
the first alarm of which we are all expected to 
run with our buckets, or it may be with our can of 



10 GRA Y 

kerosene, snatched by mistake in the hurry and 
confusion. They devoted themselves to leisure with 
as much assiduity as we employ to render it impos- 
sible. The art of being elegantly and strenuously 
idle is lost. There was no hurry then, and armies 
still weift into winter quarters punctually as mus- 
quashes. Certainly manners occupied more time 
and were allowed more space. Whenever one sees 
a picture of that age, with its broad skirts, its 
rapiers standing out almost at a right angle, and 
demanding a wide periphery to turn about, one has 
a feeling of spaciousness that suggests mental as 
well as bodily elbow-room. Now all the ologies 
follow us to our burrows in our newspaper, and 
crowd upon us with the pertinacious benevolence of 
subscription-books. Even the right of sanctuary 
is denied. The horns of the altar, which we fain 
would grasp, have become those of a dilemma in the 
attempt to combine science with theology. 

This, no doubt, is the view of a special mood, 
but it is a mood that grows upon us the longer we 
have stood upon our lees. Enough if we feel a 
faint thrill or reminiscence of ferment in the spring, 
as old wine is said to do when the grapes^ are in 
blossom. Then we are sure that we are neither 
dead nor turned to vinegar, and repeat softly to 
ourselves, in Dryden's delightful paraphrase of 
Horace : — 

" Happy the man, and happy he alone, 
He who can call to-day his own ; 
He Avho, secure within, can say, 
' To-morrow, do thy worst, for I have lived to-day ; 
Be fair or foul, or rain or shine. 



GRAY 11 

The joys I have possessed in spite of Fate are mine ; 

Not heaven itself upon the past has power, 

But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.' " 

One has a notion that in those old times the days 
were longer than now ; that a man called to-day his 
own by a securer title, and held his hours with a 
sense of divine right now obsolete. It is an absurd 
fancy, I know, and would be sent to the right-about 
by the first physicist or liistorian you happened to 
meet. But one thing I am sure of, that the private 
person was of more importance both to himself and 
others then than now, and that self-consciousness 
was, accordingly, a vast deal more comfortable be- 
cause it had less need of conscious seK-assertion. 

But the Past always has the advantage of us in 
the secret it has learned of holding its tongue, which 
may perhaps account in part for its reputed wisdom. 
Whatever the eighteenth century was, there was a 
great deal of stout fighting and work done in it, 
both physical and intellectual, and we owe it a great 
debt. Its very inef&cacy for the higher reaches of 
poetry, its very good-breeding that made it shy of 
the raised voice and flushed features of enthusiasm, 
enabled it to give us the model of a domestic and 
drawing-room prose as distinguished from that of 
the pulpit, the forum, or the closet. In Germany 
it gave us Lessing and that half century of Goethe 
which made him what he was. In France it gave 
us Voltaire, who, if he used ridicule too often for 
the satisfaction of personal spite, employed it also 
for sixty years in the service of truth and jus- 
tice, and to him more than to any other one man 



12 GRAY 

we owe it tliat we can now think and speak as we 
choose. Contemptible he may have been in more 
ways than one, but at any rate we owe him that, 
and it is surely something. In what is called the 
elegant literature of our own tongue (to speak only 
of the most eminent), it gave us Addison and Steele, 
who together made a man of genius ; Pope, whose 
vivid genius almost persuaded wit to renounce its 
proper nature and become poetry ; Thomson, who 
sought inspiration in nature, though in her least 
imaginative side ; ^ Fielding, still in some respects 
our greatest novelist ; Richardson, the only author 
who ever made long-windedness seem a benefaction ; 
Sterne, the most subtle humorist since Shakespeare ; 
Goldsmith, in whom the sweet humanity of Chau- 
cer finds its nearest parallel ; Cowper, the poet of 
Nature in her more domestic and familiar moods ; 
Johnson, whose brawny rectitude of mind more 
than atones for coarseness of fibre. Toward the 
middle of the century, also, two books were pub- 
lished which made an epoch in aesthetics, Dodsley's 
" Old Plays " (1744) and Percy's " Ballads " (1765). 
These gave the first impulse to the romantic reac- 
tion against a miscalled classicism, and were the 
seed of the literary renaissance. 

The temper of the times and the comfortable 
conditions on which life was held by the educated 

^ That Thomson was a man of true poetic sensibility is shown, I 
think, more agreeably in The Castle of Indolence than in The Sea- 
sons. In these, when he buckles the buskins of Milton on the feet 
of his natural sermo pedestris, the effect too often suggests the un- 
wieldy gait of a dismounted trooper in his jaok-boots. 



GRAY 13 

class were sure to produce a large crop of dilettante- 
ism, of delight in art and the things belonging to it 
as an elegant occupation of the mind without taxing 
its faculties too severely. If the dilettante in his 
eagerness to escape ennui sometimes become a bore 
himself, especially to the professional artist, he is 
not without his use in keeping alive the traditions 
of good taste and transmitting the counsels of ex- 
perience. In proportion as his critical faculty 
grows sensitive, he becomes incapable of production 
himself. For indeed his eye is too often trained 
rather to detect faults than excellences, and he can 
tell you where and how a thing differs for the 
worse from established precedent, hut not where it 
differs for the better. This habit of mind would 
make him distrustful of himseK and sterile in ori- 
ginal production, for his consciousness of how much 
can be said against whatever is done and even well 
done reacts upon him and makes him timid. It is 
the rarest thing to find genius and dilettanteism 
united in the same person (as for a time they were 
in Goethe), for genius implies always a certain 
fanaticism of temperament, which, if sometimes 
it seem fitful, is yet capable of intense energy on 
occasion, while the main characteristic of the dilet- 
tante is that sort of impartiality which springs from 
inertia of mind, admirable for observation, inca- 
pable of turning it to practical account. Yet we 
have, I think, an example of this rare combination 
of qualities in Gray, and it accounts both for the 
kind of excellence to which he attained, and for the 
way in which he disappointed expectation, his own, 



14 GRAY 

I suspect, j&rst of all. He is especially interesting 
as an artist in words and phrases, a literary type 
far less common among writers of English, than it 
is in France or Italy, where perhaps the traditions 
of Latin culture were never wholly lost, or, even if 
they were, continued to be operative by inheritance 
through the form they had impressed upon the 
mind. Born in 1716, he died in his 55th year, 
leaving behind him hardly fourteen hundred verses. 
Dante was one year older, Shakespeare, three years 
younger when he died. It seems a slender monu- 
ment, yet it has endured and is likely to endure, 
so close-grained is the material and so perfect the 
workmanship. When so many have written too 
nmch, we shall the more readily pardon the rare 
man who has written too little or just enough. 

The incidents of Gray's life are few and unim- 
portant. Educated at Eton and diseducated, as he 
seemed to think, at Cambridge, in his twenty-third 
year he was invited by Horace Walpole to be his 
companion in a journey to Italy. At the end of 
two years they quarrelled, and Gray returned to 
England. Dr. Johnson has explained the causes 
of this rupture, with his usual sturdy good sense 
and knowledge of human nature : " Mr. Walj)ole," 
he says, " is now content to have it told that it was 
by his fault. If we look, however, without preju- 
dice on the world, we shall find that men whose 
consciousness of their own merit sets them above 
the compliances of servility, are apt enough in their 
association with superiors to watch their own dignity 
with troublesome and punctilious jealousy, and in 



GRA Y 15 

the fervor of independence to exact that attention 
which they refuse to pay." Johnson was obeying 
Sidney's prescription of looking into his own heart 
when he wrote that. Walpole's explanation is of 
the same purport : " I was young, too fond of my 
own diversion ; nay, I do not doubt too much in- 
toxicated by indulgence, vanity, and the insolences 
of my situation as a Prime Minister's son. ... I 
treated him insolently. . . . Forgive me if I say 
that his temper was not conciliating." They were 
reconciled a few years later and continued cour- 
teously friendly till Gray's death. A meaner expla- 
nation of their quarrel has been given by gossip; 
that a letter which Gray had written home was 
opened and read by Walpole, who found in it some- 
thing not to his own advantage. But the reconcilia- 
tion sufficiently refutes this, for if Gray could have 
consented to overlook the baseness, Walpole could 
never have forgiven its detection. 

Gray was a conscientious traveller, as the notes 
he has left behind him prove. One of these, on 
the Borghese Gallery at Rome, is so characteristic 
as to be worth citing : " Several (Madonnas) of 
Rafael, Titian, Andrea del Sarto, etc., but in none 
of them all that heavenly grace and beauty that 
Guido gave, and that Carlo Maratt has so well im- 
itated in subjects of this nature." This points to 
an admission which those who admire Gray, as I do, 
are forced to make, sooner or later, that there was 
a tint of effeminacy in his nature. That he should 
have admired Norse poetry, Ossian, and the Scot- 
tish ballads is not inconsistent with this, but may 



16 GRAY 

be explained by what is called the attraction of 
opposites, which means merely that we are wont to 
overvalue qualities or aptitudes which we feel to 
be wanting in ourselves. Moreover these anti-clas- 
sical yearnings of Gray began after he had ceased 
producing, and it was not unnatural that he should 
admire men who did without thinking what he 
could not do by taking thought. Elegance, sweet- 
ness, pathos, or even majesty he could achieve, but 
never that force which vibrates in every verse of 
larger-moulded men. 

Bonstetten teUs us that " every sensation in 
Gray was passionate," but I very much doubt 
whether he was capable of that sustained passion of 
the mind which is fed by a prevailing imagination 
acting on the consciousness of great powers. That 
was something he could never feel, though he 
knew what it meant by his observation of others, 
and longed to feel it. In him imagination was 
passive ; it could divine and select, but not create. 
Bonstetten, after seeing the best society in Europe 
on equal terms, also tells us that Gray was the most 
finished gentleman he had ever seen. Is it over 
fine to see sometliing ominous in that word finished f 
It seems to imply limitations ; to imply a conscious- 
ness that sees everything between it and the goal 
rather than the goal itself, that undermines en- 
thusiasm through the haunting doubt of being 
undermined. We cannot help feeling in the poetry 
of Gray that it too is finished, perhaps I should 
rather say limited, as the greatest things never are, 
as it is one of their merits that they never can be. 



GRA Y 17 

They suggest more than they bestow, and enlarge 
our apprehension beyond their own boundaries. 
Gray shuts us in his own contentment like a cathe- 
dral close or college quadrangle. He is all the 
more interesting, perhaps, that he was a true child 
of his century, in which decorum was religion. He 
coTild not, as Dryden calls it in his generous way, 
give his soul a loose, although he would. He is 
of the eagle brood, but unfledged. His eye shares 
the aether which shall never be cloven by his wing. 
But it is one of the school-boy blunders in criti- 
cism to deny one kind of perfection because it is 
not another. Gray, more than any of our poets, has 
shown what a depth of sentiment, how much plea- 
surable emotion, mere words are capable of stirring 
through the magic of association, and of artful 
arrangement in conjunction with agreeable and fa- 
miliar images. For Gray is pictorial in the highest 
sense of the term, much more than imaginative. 
Some passages in his letters give us a hint that he 
might have been. For example, he asks his friend 
Stonehewer, in 1760, " Did you never observe 
Qichile rocking winds are piinng loud) that pause 
as the gust is re-collecting itself ? " But in his 
verse there is none of that intuitive phrase where 
the imagination at a touch precipitates thought, 
feeling, and image in an imperishable crystal. He 
knew imagination when he saw it ; no man better ; 
he could have scientifically defined it ; but it would 
not root in the artificial soil of his own garden, 
though he transplanted a bit now and then. Here 
is an instance : Dryden in his " Annus Mirabilis," 



18 GRAY 

hinting that Louis XIV. would fain have joined 
Holland against England, if he dared, says : — 

"And threatening France, placed like a painted Jove, 
Held idle thunder in his lifted hand." 

Gray felt how fine this was, and makes his 
Agrippina say that it was she 

"that armed 
This painted Jove and taught his novice hand 
To aim the forked bolt, -while he stood trembling, 
Seared at the sound and dazzled with its brightness." 

Pretty well, one would say, for a ^'■painted Jove " ! 
The imagination is sometimes super grammaticam, 
like the Emperor Sigismund, but it is coherent by 
the very law of its being.^ 

Gray brought home from France and Italy a 
familiar knowledge of their languages, and that en- 
larged culture of the eye which is one of the insen- 
sible, as it is one of the greatest gains of travel. 
The adventures he details in his letters are gen- 
erally such as occur to all the world, but there is 
a passage in one of them in which he describes a 
scene at Rheims in 1739, so curious and so charac- 
teristic of the time as to be worth citing : — 

" The other evening we happened to be got together 
in a company of eighteen people, men and women of the 
best fashion here, at a garden in the town to walk ; when 
one of the ladies bethought herself of asking 'Why 
should not we sup here ? ' Immediately the cloth was 

^ It is always interesting to trace the germs of lucky phrases. 
Dryden was familiar with the works of Beaumont and Fletcher, 
and it may be suspected that this noble image was suggested by a 
verse in The Double Marriage — " Thou woven Worthy in a piece 
of arras." 



GRAY 19 

laid by the side of a fountain under the trees, and a very- 
elegant supper served up ; after which another said, 
' Come, let us sing,' and directly began herself ; from 
singing we insensibly fell to dancing and singing in a 
round, when somebody mentioned the violins, and imme- 
diately a company of them was ordered. Minuets were 
begun in the open air, and then came country dances 
which held till four o'clock in the morning, at which 
hour the gayest lady there proposed that such as were 
weary should get into their coaches, and the rest . . . 
should dance before them with the music in the van ; 
and in this manner we paraded through the principal 
streets of the city and waked everybody in it." 

This recalls the garden of Boccaccio, and if it be 
hard to fancy the " melancholy Gray " leading off 
such a jig of Conrns, it is almost harder to conceive 
that this was only fifty years before the French 
Revolution. And yet it was precisely this gay 
insouciance, this forgetfulness that the world ex- 
isted for any but a single class in it, and this care- 
lessness of the comfort of others that made the 
catastrophe possible. 

Immediately on his return he went back to Cam- 
bridge, where he spent (with occasional absences) 
the rest of his days, first at Peter House and then 
at Pembroke College. In 1768, three years before 
his death, he was appointed professor of Modern 
Literature and Languages, but he never performed 
any of its functions except that of receiving the 
salary — " so did the Muse defend her son." John- 
son describes him as "always designing lectures, 
but never reading them; uneasy at his neglect of< 



20 GRAY 

duty and appeasing his uneasiness with designs of 
reformation and with a resolution, which he believed 
himself to have made, of resigning the office, if he 
found himself unable to discharge it." This is ex- 
cellently well divined, for nobody knew better than 
Johnson what a master of casuistry is indolence, 
but I find no trace of any such feeling in Gray's 
correspondence. After the easy-going fashion of 
his day he was more likely to consider his salary as 
another form of pension. 

The first poem of Gray that was printed was the 
" Ode on the Distant Prospiect of Eton College," and 
this when he was already thirty-one. The " Elegy " 
followed in 1750, the other lesser odes in 1753, 
" The Progress of Poesy " and the " Bard " in 1757. 
Collins had preceded him in this latter species of 
composition, a man of more original imagination 
and more fervent nature, but inferior in artistic 
instinct. Mason gives a droll reason for the suc- 
cess of the " Elegy : " " It spread at first on account 
of the affecting and pensive cast of the subject — 
just like Hervey's ' Meditations on the Tombs.' " 
What Walpole called Gray's flowering period ended 
with his fortieth year. From that time forward he 
wrote no more. Twelve years later, it is true, he 
writes to Walpole : — 

" What has one to do, when turned of fifty, but really 
to think of finishing? . . . However, I will be candid 
. . . and avow to you that, till fourscore and ten, when- 
ever the humor takes me, I will write because I like it, 
and because I like myself better when I do so. If I do 
not write much it is because I cannot." 



GRAY 21 

Chaucer was growing plumper over his " Canter- 
bury Tales," and the " Divina Commedia " was still 
making Dante leaner^ when both those poets were 
"turned of fifty." Had Milton pleaded the same 
discharge, we should not have had " Paradise Lost " 
and " Samson Agonistes." 

No doubt Gray could have written more " if he 
had set himself doggedly about it," as Johnson 
has recommended in such cases, but he never did, 
and I suspect that it was this neglect rather than 
that of his lectures that irked hun. The words 
" because I like myself better when I do" seem to 
point in that direction. Bonstetten, who knew him 
a year later than the date of this letter, says : — 

" The poetical genius of Gray was so extinguished in 
the gloomy residence of Cambridge that the recollection 
of his poems was hateful to him. He never permitted 
me to speak to him about them. When I quoted some 
of his verses to him, he held his tongue like an obstinate 
child. I said to him sometimes, ' Will you not answer 
me, then ? ' but no word came from his lips. I saw him 
every evening from five o'clock till midnight. We read 
Shakespeare, whom he adored, Dryden, Pope, Milton, 
etc., and our conversations, like those of friendship, 
knew no end. I told Gray about my life and my 
country, but all his own life was shut from me. Never 
did he speak of himself. There was in Gray between 
the present and the past an impassable abyss. When I 
would have approached it, gloomy clouds began to cover 
it. I believe that Gray had never loved ; this was the 
key to the riddle." 

One cannot help wishing that Bonstetten had 



22 GRAY 

Boswellized some of these endless conversations, 
for the talk of Gray was, on the testimony of all 
who heard it, admirable for fulness of knowledge, 
point, and originality of thought. Sainte-Beuve, 
commenting on the words of Bonstetten, says, with 
his usual quick insight and graceful cleverness : — 

" Je ne sais si Bonstetten avait devin^ juste at si le 
secret de la mdlancolie de Gray ^tait dans ce manque 
d'amour ; je le chercherais plutot dans la st^rilit^ d'un 
talent podtique si distingu^, si rare, mais si avare. Oh ! 
comme je le comprends mieux, dans ce sens-la, le silence 
obstin^ et boudeur des poetes profonds, arrives a un cer- 
tain age et taris, cette rancune encore aimante envers ce 
qu'on a tant aim^ et qui ne reviendra plus, cette douleur 
d'une ame orpb^line de podsie et qui ne veut pas etre 
consol^e ! " 

But Sainte-Beuve was thinking rather of the au- 
thor of a certain volume of French poetry published 
under the pseudonym of Joseph Delorme than of 
Gray. Gray had been a successful poet, if ever 
there was one, for he had pleased both the few and 
the many. There is a great difference between 
I could if I would and I would if I could in their 
effect on the mind. Sainte-Beuve is perhaps partly 
right, but it may be fairly surmised that the re- 
morse for intellectual indolence should have had 
some share in making Gray unwilling to recall the 
time when he was better employed than in filling-in 
coats-of-arms on the margin of Dugdale and cor- 
recting the Latin of Linnaeus. I suspect that his 
botany, his heraldry, and his weather - calendars 
were mere expedients to make himself believe he 



GRAY 23 

was doing something, and that he might have an 
excuse ready when conscience reproached him with 
not doing something he could do better. He speaks 
of " his natural indolence and indisposition to act," 
in a letter to Wharton. Temple tells us that he 
wished rather to be looked on as a gentleman 
than as a man of letters, and this may have been 
partly true at a time when authorship was stiU 
lodged in Grub Street and in many cases deserved 
no better. Gray had the admirable art of making 
himself respected by beginning first himself. He 
always treated Thomas Gray with the distinguished 
consideration he deserved. Perhaps neither Bon- 
stetten nor Sainte-Beuve was precisely the man to 
imderstand the more than English reserve of Gray, 
the reserve of a man as proud as he was sensitive. 
And Gray's pride was not, as it sometimes is, allied 
to vanity ; it was personal rather than social, if 
I may attempt a distinction which I feel but can 
hardly define. After he became famous, one of 
the several Lords Gray claimed kindred with him, 
perhaps I shoidd say was willing that he should 
claim it, on the ground of a similarity of arms. 
Gray preferred his own private distinction, and 
would not admit their lordships to any partner- 
ship in it. Michael Angelo, who fancied himself a 
proud man, was in haste to believe a purely imagi- 
nary pedigree that derived him from the Counts of 
Canossa. 

That I am right in saying that Gray's melan- 
choly was in part remorse at (if I may not say the 
waste) the abeyance of his powers, may be read 



24 GRAY 

between tlie lines (I tliink) in more ttan one of 
his letters. His constant endeavor was to occupy 
himseK in whatever would save him from the reflec- 
tion of how he might occupy himself better. " To 
fuid one's self business," he says, " (I am per- 
suaded), is the great art of hfe. . . . Some spirit, 
some genius (more than common) is required to 
teach a man how to employ himself." And else- 
where : " to be employed is to be happy," which 
was a saying he borrowed of Swift, another self- 
dissatisfied man. Bonstetten says in French tliat 
" his mind was gay and his character melancholy." 
In German he substitutes " soul" for "character." 
He was cheerful, that is, in any company but his 
own, and this, it may be guessed, because faculties 
were called into play which he had not the innate 
force to rouse into more profitable activity. Gray's 
melancholy was that of Richard II. : — 

" I wasted time, and now doth time waste me, 
For now hath time made me his numbering-clock." 

Whatever the cause, it began about the time 
when he had finally got his two great odes off his 
hands. At first it took the form of resignation, as 
when he writes to Mason in 1757 : — 

" I can only tell you that one who has far more reason 
than you, I hope, will ever have to look on life with 
something worse than indifference, is yet no enemy to it, 
but can look backward on many bitter moments, partly 
with satisfaction, and partly with patience, and forward, 
too, on a scene not very promising, with some hope and 
some expectation of a better day." 

But it is only fair to give his own explanation of 



GRAY 25 

his Tmproductiveness. He writes to Wharton, who 
had asked hun for an epitaph on a child just lost : — 

" I by no means pretend to inspiration, but yet I 
affirm that the faculty in question is by no means volun^ 
tary. It is the result, I suppose, of a certain disposition 
of mind which does not depend on one's self, and which 
I have not felt this long time." 

In spite of this, however, it should be remem- 
bered that the motive power always becomes slug- 
gish in men who too easily admit the supremacy of 
moods. But an age of common sense would very 
greatly help such;. a man as Gray to distrust him- 
self. 

If Gray ceased to write poetry, let us be thank- 
ful that he continued to write letters. Cowper, the 
poet, a competent judge, for he wrote excellent 
letters himself, and therefore had studied the art, 
says, writing to Hill in 1777 : — 

*' I once thought Swift's letters the best that could be 
written ; but I like Gray's better. His humor, or his 
wit, or whatever it is to be called, is never ill-natured or 
offensive, and yet, I think, equally poignant with the 
Dean's." 

I tliink the word that Cowper was at a loss for 
was playfulneas, the most delightful ingredient in 
letters, for Gray can hardly be said to have had 
humor in the deeper sense of the word. The near- 
est approach to it I remember is where he writes 
(as Lamb would have ^vritten) to Walpole suffer- 
ing with the gout : " The pain in your feet I can 
bear. " He has the knack of sayiDg droll things 



26 GRAY 

in an ofP-Hand way, and as if they cost Mm nothing. 
It is only the most delicately trained hand that can 
venture on this playful style, easy as it seems, with- 
out danger of a catastrophe, and Gray's perfect 
elegance could nowhere have found a more admi- 
rable foil than in the vulgar jauntiness and clumsy 
drollery of his correspondent, Mason. Let me cite 
an example or two. 

He writes to Wharton, 1753 : — 

" I take it ill you should say anything against the 
Mole. It is a reflection, I see, cast at the Thames. Do 
you think that rivers which have lived in London and its 
neighbourhood all their days will run roaring and tum- 
bling about like your tramontane torrents in the North .'' " 

To Brown, 1767 : — 

" Pray that the Trent may not intercept us at Newark, 
for we have had infinite rain here, and they say every 
brook sets up for a river." 

Of the French, he writes to Walpole, m Paris : — 

"I was much entertained with your account of our 
neighbours. As an Englishman and an anti-Gallican, I 
rejoice at their dulness and their nastiness, though I 
fear we shall come to imitate them in both. Their athe- 
ism is a little too much, too shocking to be rejoiced at. 
I have long been sick at it in their authors and hated 
them for it ; but I pity their poor innocent people of 
fashion. They were bad enough when they believed 
everything." 

Of course it is difficult to give mstances of a 
thing in its nature so evanescent, yet so subtly per- 
vasive, as what we call tone. I think it is in this, 



GRAY 27 

if in anything, that Gray's letters are on the whole 
superior to Swift's. This playfulness of Gray very 
easily becomes tenderness on occasion, and even 
pathos. 

Writing to his friend Nicholls in 1765, he says : 

" It is long since I heard you were'-gone in haste into 
Yorkshire on account of your mother's illness, and the 
same letter informed me she was recovered. Otherwise 
I had then wrote to you only to beg you would take 
care of her, and to inform you that I had discovered a 
thing very Httle known, which is, that in one's whole 
life one can never have any more than a single mother. 
You may think this obvious and (what you call) a trite 
observation. . . . You are a green gosling ! I was at 
the same age (very near) as wise as you, and yet I never 
discovered this (with full evidence and conviction, I 
mean) till it was too late. It is thirteen years ago and 
it seems but as yesterday, and every day I hve it sinks 
deeper into my heart." 

In his letters of condolence, perhaps the most 
arduous species of all composition, Gray shows the 
same exquisite tact which is his distinguishing char- 
acteristic as a poet. And he shows it by never 
attempting to console. Perhaps his notions on this 
matter may be divined in what he writes to Wal- 
pole about Lyttelton's " Elegy on his Wife : " — 

" I am not totally of your mind as to Mr. Lyttelton's 
elegy, though I love kids and fawns as little as you do. 
If it were all like the fourth stanza I should be exces- 
sively pleased. Nature and sorrow and tenderness are 
the true genius of such things ; and something of these 
I find in several parts of it (not in the orange tree) ; 



28 GRAY 

poetical ornaments are foreign to the purpose, for they 
only show a man is not sorry ; and devotion worse, for 
it teaches him that he ought not to he sorry, which is all 
the pleasure of the thing." 

And to Mason he writes in September, 1753 : — 

" I know what it is to lose a person that one's eyes 
and heart have long been used to, and I never desire to 
part with the rememhrance of that loss." (His mother 
died in the March of that year.) 

Gray's letters also are a mine of acute observa- 
tion and sliarijly-edged criticism upon style, espe- 
cially those to Mason and Beattie. His ohiter 
dicta have the weight of wide reading and much 
reflection by a man of delicate apprehension and 
tenacious memory for principles. " Mr. Gray 
used to say," Mason tells us, "that good writing 
not only required great parts, but the very best of 
those parts." ^ I quote a few of his sayings almost 
at random : — 

" Have you read Clarendon's book ? Do you remem- 
ber Mr. Cambridge's account of it before it came out ? 
How weU he recollected all the faults, and how utterly 
he forgot all the beauties ? Surely the grossest taste is 
better than such a sort of delicacy." 

" I think even a bad verse as good a thing or better 
than the best observation that ever was made upon it." 

^ This, perhaps, suggested to Coleridge his admirable defini- 
tion of the distinction between the language of poetry and of 
prose. It is almost certain that Coleridge learned from Gray his 
nicety in the use of Towel-sounds and the secret that in a verse it 
is the letter that giveth life quite as often as the spirit. Many 
poets have been intuitively lucky in the practice of this art, but 
Gray had formulated it. 



GRA Y 29 

" Half a word fixed upon or near the spot is worth a 
cart-load of recollection." (He is speaking of descrip- 
tions of scenery, but what he says is of wider applica- 
tion.) 

" Froissart is the Herodotus of a barbarous age." 
" Jeremy Taylor is the Shakespeare of divines." 
" I rejoice when I see Machiavel defended or illus- 
trated, who to me appears one of the wisest men that 
any nation in any age has produced." 

" In truth, Shakespeare's language is one of his prin- 
cipal beauties, and he has no less advantage over your 
Addisons and Rowes in this than in those other great 
excellencies you mention. Every word in him is a pic- 
ture." 

Of Dryden lie said to Beattie : — 

" That if there was any excellence in his own num- 
bers he had learned it wholly from that great poet, and 
pressed him with great earnestness to study, as his 
choice of words and [his] versification were singularly 
happy and harmonious." 

And again lie says in a postscript to Beattie : — 

" Remember Dryden, and be blind to all his faults." 

To Mason he writes : — 

" All I can say is that your ' Elegy ' must not end with 
the worst line in it ; it is flat, it is prose ; whereas that, 
above all, ought to sparkle, or at least to shine. If the 
sentiment must stand, twirl it a little into an apothegm, 
stick a flower in it, gild it with a costly expression ; let 
it strike the fancy, the ear, or the heart, and I am 
satisfied." 

Gray and Mason together, however, could not 
make the latter a poet ! 



30 GRA Y 

" Now I insist that sense is nothing in poetry, but 
according to the dress she wears and the scene she 
appears in." 

" I have got the old Scotch ballad on which ' Douglas ' 
[Home's] was founded ; it is divine, and as long as 
from hence to Ashton. Have you never seen it ? Aris- 
totle's best rules are observed in it in a manner that 
shows the author never had heard of Aristotle." 

" This latter [speaking of a passage in ' Caractacus ' j 
is exemplary for the expression (always the great point 
with me) ; I do not mean by expression the mere choice 
of words, but the whole dress, fashion, and arrangement 
of a thought." 

"Extreme conciseness of expression, yet pure, per- 
spicuous, and musical, is one of the grand beauties of 
lyric poetry ; this I have always aimed at and never 
could attain." 

Of his own Agrippina lie says : — 

" She seemed to me to talk like an old boy all in 
figures and mere poetry, instead of nature and the lan- 
guage of real passion." 

Of the minuteness of Ms care in matters of ex- 
pression an example or two will suffice. Writing 
to Mason he says : — 

" Sure ' seers ' comes over too often ; besides, it sounds 
ill." " Plann'd is a nasty stiff word." " I cannot give 
up ' lost ' for it begins with an I." 

Yet Gray's nice ear objected to " -yain -yision " 
as hard. 

It may be asked if those minutiae of alliteration 
and of close or open vowel-soimds are consistent 
with anything like that ecstasy of mind, from 



GRA Y 31 

which the highest poetry is supposed to spring, 
and which it is its function to reproduce in the 
mind of the reader. But whoever would write 
well must learn to write. Shelley was almost as 
great a corrector of his own verses as Pope. Even 
in Shakespeare we can trace the steps and even the 
models by which he arrived at that fatality of 
phrase which seems like immediate inspiration. 
One ^t least of the objects of writing is (or was) 
to be read, and, other things being equal, the best 
writers are those who make themselves most easily 
readable. Gray's great claim to the rank he holds 
is derived from his almost unrivalled skill as an 
artist, in words and sounds ; as an artist, too, who 
knew how to compose his thoughts and images 
with a thorough knowledge of perspective. This 
explams why he is so easy to remember ; why, 
though he wrote so little, so much of what he 
wrote is familiar on men's tongues. There are 
certain plants that have seeds with hooks by which 
they cling to any passing animal and impress his 
legs into the service of their locomotion and dis- 
tribution. Gray's phrases have the same gift of 
hooking themselves into the memory, and it was 
due to the exquisite artifice of their construc- 
tion. His "Elegy," certainly not through any 
originality of thought, but far more through origi- 
nality of sound, has charmed all ears from the day 
it was published ; and the measure in which it is 
written, though borrowed by Gray of Dryden^ by 
Dryden of Davenant, by Davenant of Davies, and 
by him of Raleigh, is ever since associated with 



32 GRAY 

that poem as if by some exclusive right of prop- 
erty. Perhaps the great charm of the " Elegy " is 
to be found m its embodying that pensively sting- 
less pessimism which comes with the first gray 
hair ; that vague sympathy with ourselves, which is 
so much cheaper than sympathy with others ; that 
placid melancholy which satisfies the general ap- 
petite for an emotion which titillates rather than 
wounds. 

The "Progress of Poesy" and "The Bard" 
made their way more slowly, though the judgment 
of the elect (the Swarot to whom Gray proudly 
appealed) placed them at the head of English lyric 
poetry. By the majority they were looked on as di- 
vine in the sense that they were past all understai^d- 
ing. Goldsmith criticised them in the " Monthly 
Review," and a few passages of his article are 
worth quoting as coming from him : — 

"We cannot, however, without some regret, behold 
those talents so capable of giving pleasure to all, exerted 
in efEorts that, at best, can amuse only the few ; we 
cannot behold this rising poet seeking fame among the 
learned, without hinting to him the same advice that 
Isocrates used to give his pupils, ' Study the people.' 
. . . He speaks to a people not easily impressed with 
new ideas ; extremely tenacious of the old ; with diffi- 
culty warmed and as slowly cooling again. How un- 
suited, then, to our national character is that species of 
poetry which I'ises on us with unexpected flights ; where 
we must hastily catch the thought or it flies from us ; 
and in short, where the reader must largely partake of 
the poet's enthusiasm in order to taste his beauties ! 
. . . These two odes, it must be confessed, breathe much 



GRA Y 33 

of the spirit of Pindar ; but then they have caught the 
seeming obscurity, the sudden transition and hazardous 
epithet of the mighty master, all which, though evidently 
intended for beauties, will probably be regarded as 
blemishes by the generality of readers. In short, they 
are in some measure a representation of what Pindar 
now appears to be, though perhaps not what he ap- 
peared to the States of Greece." 

Goldsmith preferred " The Bard " to the " Prog- 
ress of Poesy." We seem to see him willing to 
praise and yet afraid to like. He is possessed by 
the true spirit of his age. For my part I think I 
see as much influence of the Italian " Canzone " as 
of Pindar in these odes. Nor would they be better 
for being more like Pindar. Ought not a thing 
once thoroughly well done to be left conscientiously 
alone ? And was it not Gray's object that these 
odes should have something of the same inspiring 
effect on English-speaking men as those others on 
Greek-speaking men? To give the same lift to 
the fancy and feeling? Goldsmith unconsciously 
gave them the right praise when he said they had 
" caught the spirit " of the elder poet. I remem- 
ber hearing Emerson say some thirty years ago, 
that he valued Gray chiefly as a comment on 
Pindar. 

Gray himself seems to have kept his balance 
very well ; indeed, it may be conjectured that he 
knew the shortcomings of his work better than 
any one else could have told him of them. He 
writes to Hurd : — 

"As your acquaintance in the University (you say) 



34 GRA Y 

do me the honor to admire, it would be ungenerous 
in me not to give them notice that they are doing a 
very unfashionable thing, for all People of Condition 
are agreed not to admire, nor even to understand. One 
very great man, vrriting to an acquaintance of his and 
mine, says that he had read them seven or eight times, 
and that now, when he next sees him, he shall not 
have above thirty questions to" ask. Another, a peer, 
believes that the last stanza of the second Ode relates to 
King Charles the First and Oliver Cromwell. Even 
my friends tell me they do not succeed, and write me 
moving topics of consolation on that head. In short, I 
have heard of nobody but an actor and a Doctor of Divin- 
ity that profess their esteem for them. Oh yes, a lady 
of quality (a friend of Mason's), who is a great reader. 
She knew there was a compliment to Dryden, but never 
suspected there was anything said about Shakespeare 
and Milton, till it was explained to her ; and wishes that 
there had been titles prefixed to tell what they were 
about." 

If the success of tlie Odes was not sueli as to en- 
courage Gray to write more, they certainly added 
to liis fame and made their way to admiration in 
France and Italy. 

The fate of Gray since his death has been a 
singular one. He has been luiderrated both by 
the Apostles of Common Sense and of Imagina- 
tion, by Johnson, and Wordsworth. Johnson was 
in an uncommonly surly mood even for him when 
he wrote his life of Gray. He blames and praises 
him for the same thing. He makes it a fault in 
the " Ode on the Distant Prospect of Eton College," 
that " the prospect . . . suggests nothing to Gray 



GRA Y 35 

which every beholder does not equally think and 
feel ; " and a merit of the " Elegy," that " it abounds 
with images which find a mirror in every mind, 
and with sentiments to which every bosom returns 
an echo." This no doubt is one of the chief praises 
of Gray, as of other jDoets, that he is the voice of 
emotions common to all mankind. " Tell me what 
I feel," is what everybody asks of the poet. But 
surely it makes some difference how we are told. 
It is one proof how good a thing is that it looks so 
easy after it is done. Johnson growls also at Mr. 
Walpole's cat, as if he were one of the race which 
is the hereditary foe of that animal. He hits a 
blot when he criticises " the azure flowers that 
blow," but is blind to the easy fancy, the almost 
feline grace of the whole, with its playful claws of 
satire sheathed in velvet. 

Wordsworth in his famous Preface attacks Gray 
as " the head of those who by their reasonings 
have attempted to widen the space of separation 
betwixt prose and metrical composition " [he means 
betwixt the language of the two], " and was more 
than any other man curiously elaborate in the 
structure of his own poetic diction." He then 
quotes Gray's sonnet on the death of his friend 
West. 

' ' In vain to me the smiling' mornings shine, 
And reddening Phcebus lifts his golden fire ; 
The birds in vain their amorous descant join, 
Or cheerful fields resume their g.reen attire ; 
These ears, alas, for other notes repine, 
A different object do these eyes require : 
My lonely anguish melts no heart hut mine ; 
And in my breast the imperfect joys expire. 



36 GRA Y 

Yet morning smiles the tusy race to cheer, 
And newborn pleasure springs to happier men ; 
The fields to all their wonted tribute bear ; 
To warm their little loves the birds complain ; 
I fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear, 
And weep the more because I weep in vain." 

" It will easily be perceived that the only part of 
this sonnet which is of any value is the lines printed 
in italics ; it is equally obvious that except in the 
rhyme and in the use of the single word 'fruit- 
less ' for ' fruitlessly,' which is so far a defect, the 
language of these lines does in no respect differ 
from that of prose." I think this criticism a little 
ungracious, for it would not be easy to find many 
sonnets (even of Wordsworth's own) with five 
first-rate verses out of the fourteen. But what is 
most curious is that Wordsworth should not have 
seen that this very sonnet disproves the theory of 
diction with which he charges him. I cannot find 
that he had any such theory. He does, indeed, say 
somewhere that the language of the age is never 
the language of poetry, which if taken as he mider- 
stood it is true, but I know not where Wordsworth 
found his " reasonings." Gray by the language 
of the age meant the language of conversation, 
for he goes on to say, " Except among the French, 
whose verse, where the thought or image does not 
support it, differs in nothing from prose." Gray's 
correspondence with Mason proves that he had no 
such theory. Let a pair of instances suf&ce. 

" There is an affectation in so often iising the 
old phrase ' or ere ' for ' before.' " " Intellect is 
a word of science and therefore inferior to any 



GRAY 37 

more common word." Wordsworth should have 
had more sympathy with a man who loved moun- 
tains as well as he, and not wholly in the eighteenth- 
century fashion either. " Not a precipice, not a 
torrent, not a cliff," writes Gray from the Grande 
Chartreuse, "but is -pvegnamt with religion and 
poetry." That was Wordsworth's own very view, 
his ownty-downty view one is sometimes tempted 
to call it, when he won't let anybody else have a 
share in it. 

After a journey in Scotland : — 

" The Lowlands are worth seeing once, but the moun- 
tains are ecstatic and ought to be visited in pilgrimage 
once a year. None but those monstrous creatures of God 
know how to join so much beauty with so much horror. 
A fig for your poets, painters, gardeners, and clergymen 
that have not been among them ; their imagination can 
be made up of nothing but bowling-greens, flowering- 
shrubs, horse-ponds, Fleet-ditches, shell-grottoes, and 
Chinese rails." 

Sir James Mackintosh says that Gray first traced 
out every picturesque tour in Britain, and Gray 
was a perpetual invalid. He discovered the Wye 
before Wordsworth, and floated down it in a boat, 
"near forty miles, surrounded with ever-new de- 
Hghts ; " nay, it was he who made known the Lake 
region to the Lakers themselves. Wordsworth, I 
can't help thinking, had a little unconscious jeal- 
ousy of Gray, whose fame as the last great poet 
was perhaps somewhat obtrusive when Words- 
worth was at the University. His last word about 
liim is in a letter to GiUies in 1816. 



38 GRA Y 

" Gray failed as a poet not because he took too much 
pains and so extinguished his animation, but because he 
had very little of that fiery quality to begin with, and 
his pains were of the wrong sort. He wrote English 
verses as his brother Eton schoolboys wrote Latin, filch- 
ing a phrase now from one author and now from an- 
other. I do not profess to be a person of very various 
reading ; nevertheless, if I were to pluck out of Gray's 
taU all of the feathers which I know belong to other 
birds, he would be left very bare indeed. Do not let any- 
body persuade you that any quantity of good verses can 
be produced by mere felicity ; or that an immortal style 
can be the growth of mere genius. ' Midta tulit fecit- 
que ' must be the motto of all those who are to last." ^ 

What would be left to Gray after this plucking 
would be bis genius, for genius be certainly bad, 
or be could not have produced tbe effect of it. The 
gentle Cowper, no bad critic also be, was kinder. 

" I have been reading Gray's works," he says, " and 
think him the only poet since Shakespeare entitled to the 
character of sublime. Perhaps you will remember that 
I once had a different opinion of him. I was preju- 
diced." 

In spite of unjust depreciation and misapplied 
criticism, Gray holds bis own and bids fair to last 

■'■ I need not point out that Wordsworth is a little confused, if 
not self-contradictory in this criticism. I will add only two quo- 
tations to show that accidents will happen to the best-regulated 
poets : — 

" At distance heard the murmur of many waterfalls not audible 
in the day-time." — Gray to Wharton, 1769. 

" A soft and lulling sound is heard 
Of streams inaudible by day." — White Doe. 

Gray probably guided Wordsworth to the vein of gold in Dyer. 



GRA Y 39 

as long as the language which he knew how to write 
so well and of which he is one of the glories. 
Wordsworth is justified in saying that he helped 
himself from everybody and everywhere — and yet 
he made such admirable use of what he stole (if 
theft there was) that we should as soon think of 
finding fault with a man for pillaging the diction- 
ary. He mixed liimseK with whatever he took — 
an incalculable increment. In the editions of his 
poems, the thin line of text stands at the top of 
the page like cream, and below it is the skim-milk 
drawn from many milky mothers of the herd out 
of which it has risen. But the thing to be con- 
sidered is that, no matter where the material came 
from, the result is Gray's own. Whether original 
or not, he knew how to make a poem, a very rare 
knowledge among men. The thought in Gray is 
neither uncommon nor profound, and you may call 
it beatified commonplace if you choose. I shall not 
contradict you. I have lived long enough to know 
that there is a vast deal of commonplace in the 
world of no particular use to anybody, and am 
thankfid to the man who has the divine gift to 
idealize it for me. Nor am I offended with this 
odor of the library that hangs about Gray, for it 
recalls none but delightful associations. It was in 
the very best literature that Gray was steeped, and 
I am glad that both he and we should profit by it. 
If he appropriated a fine phrase wherever he found 
it, it was by right of eminent domain, for surely 
he was one of the masters of language. His praise 
is that what he touched was idealized, and kindled 



40 GRA Y 

with some virtue that was not there before, but 
came from him. 

And he was the most conscientious of artists. 
Some of the verses which he discards in deference 
to this conscientiousness of form which sacrifices 
the poet to the poem, the parts to the whole, and 
regards nothing- but the effect to be produced, would 
have made the fortune of - another poet. Take for 
example this stanza omitted from the " Elegy " (just 
before the Epitaph), because, says Mason, "he 
thought it was too long a parenthesis in this 
place." 

' ' There scattered oft, the earliest of the year, 
By hands unseen are showers of yiolets found ; 
The redbreast loves to build and warble there, 
And little footsteps lightly print the ground." 

Gray might run his pen through this, but he 
could not obliterate it from the memory of men. 
Surely Wordsworth himself never achieved a sim- 
plicity of language so pathetic in suggestion, so 
musical in movement as this. 

Any slave of the mine may find the rough gem, 
but it is the cutting and polishing that reveal its 
heart of fire ; it is the setting that makes of it 
a jewel to hang at the ear of Time. If Gray cull 
his words and phrases here, there, and everywhere, 
it is he who charges them with the imaginative or 
picturesque touch which only he could give and 
which makes them magnetic. For example, in 
these two verses of " The Bard : " — 

" Amazement in his van with Flight combined, 
And Sorrow's faded form and Solitude behind ! " 



GRA Y 41 

The suggestion (we are informed by tlie notes) 
came from Cowper and Oldliam, and the amaze- 
ment combined with flight sticks fast in prose. But 
the personification of Sorrow and the fine general- 
ization of Solitude in the last verse which gives an 
imaginative reach to the whole passage are Gray's 
own. The owners of what Gray " conveyed " 
would have f omid it hard to identify their property 
and prove title to it after it had once suffered the 
Gray-change by steeping in his mind and memory. 

When the example in our Latin Grammar tells 
us that Mors communis est omnibus, it states a 
truism of considerable interest, indeed, to the per- 
son in whose particular case it is to be illustrated, 
but neither new nor startling. No one would 
think of citing it, whether to produce conviction or 
to heighten discourse. Yet mankind are agreed in 
finding something more poignant in the same re- 
flection when Horace tells us that the palace as well 
as the hovel shudders at the indiscriminating foot 
of Death. Here is something more than the dry 
statement of a truism. The difference between the 
two is that between a lower and a higher ; it is, 
in short, the difference, between prose and poetry. 
The oyster has begun, at least, to secrete its pearl, 
something identical with its shell in substance, 
but in sentiment and association how unhke ! Mal- 
herbe takes the same image and makes it a little 
more picturesque, though, at the same time, I fear, 
a little more Parisian, too, when he says that the sen- 
tinel pacing before the gate of the Louvre cannot 
forbid Death an entrance to the King. And how 



42 GRA Y 

long had not that comparison between the rose's 
life and that of the maiden dying untimely been a 
commonplace when the same Malherbe made it ir- 
reclaimably his own by mere felicity of phrase ? We 
do not ask where people got their hints, but what 
they made out of them. The commonplace is un- 
happily within reach of us aU, and unhappily, too, 
they are rare who can give it novelty and even 
invest it with a kind of grandeur as Gray knew how 
to do. If his poetry be a mosaic, the design is 
always his own. He, if any, had certainly " the 
last and greatest art," the art to please. Shall we 
call everything mediocre that is not great ? Shall 
we deny ourselves to the charm of sentiment because 
we prefer the electric shudder that imagination 
gives us ? Even were Gray's claims to being a 
great poet rejected, he can never be classed with 
the many, so great and uniform are the efficacy 
of his phrase and the music to which he sets it. 
This unique distinction, at least, may be claimed for 
hitn without dispute, that he is the one English poet 
who has written less and pleased more than any 
other. Above all it is as a teacher of the art of 
writing that he is to be valued. If there be any 
well of English undefiled, it is to be found in him 
and his master, Dry den. They are still standards 
of what may be called classical English, neither 
archaic nor modern, and as far removed from 
pedantry as from vulgarity. They were 

"Tous deux disciples d'une escole 
Oil I'on forcene doucement," 

a school in which have been enrolled the Great 
Masters of literature. 



SOME LETTERS OF WALTER SAVAGE 
LANDOR.i 

1888. 

I WAS first directed to Landor's works by hear- 
ing liow much store Emerson set by them. I grew 
acquainted with them fifty years ago in one of those 
arched alcoves in the old college library in Harvard 
Hall, which so pleasantly secluded without wholly 
isolating the student. That footsteps should pass 
across the mouth of his Aladdin's Cave, or even 
enter it in search of treasure, so far from disturb- 
ing only deepened his sense of possession. These 
faint rumors of the world he had left served but 
as a pleasant reminder that he was the privileged 
denizen of another, beyond "the flaming bounds 
of place and time." There, with my book lying at 
ease and in the expansion of intimacy on the broad 
window-sheK, shifting my cell from north to south 
with the season, I made friendships, that have 
lasted me for life, with Dodsley's "Old Plays," 
with Cotton's "Montaigne," with Hakluyt's "Voy- 
ages," among others that were not in my father's 
library. It was the merest browsing, no doubt, as 
Johnson called it, but how delightful it was ! All 

^ Written to introduce Landor's letters to the readers of The 
Century Magazine, in -which they were first published. 



44 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 

the more, I fear, because it added the stolen sweet- 
ness of truancy to that of study, for I should have 
been buckling to my allotted task of the day. I 
do not regret that diversion of time to other than 
legitimate expenses, yet shall I not gravely warn 
my grandsons to beware of doing the like? 

I was far from understanding all I heard in this 
society of my elders into which I had smuggled my- 
self, and perhaps it was as well for me ; but those 
who formed it condescended to me at odd moments 
with the tolerant complacency of greatness, and 
I did not go empty away. Landor was in many 
ways beyond me, but I loved the company he 
brought, making persons for me of what before had 
been futile names, and letting me hear the discourse 
of men about whom Plutarch had so often told me 
such delightful stories. He charmed me, some- 
times perhaps he imposed on me, with the stately 
eloquence that moved to measure always, often to 
music, and never enfeebled itself by undue empha- 
sis, or raised its tone above the level of good breed- 
ing. In those ebullient years of my adolescence 
it was a wholesome sedative. His sententiousness, 
too, had its charm, equally persuasive in the care- 
fully draped folds of the chlamys or the succinct 
tunic of epigram. If Plato had written in English, 
I thought, it is thus that he would have written. 
Here was a man who knew what literature was, 
who had assimilated what was best in it, and him- 
self produced or reproduced it. 

Three years later, while I was trying to persuade 



WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 45 

myself that I was reading law, a friend ^ who knew 
better gave me the first series of the "Imaginary 
Conversations," in three volumes, to which I pres- 
ently added the second series, and by degrees all 
Landor's other books as I could pick them up, or 
as they were successively published. Thus I grew 
intimate with him, and, as my own judgment grad- 
ually affirmed itseK, was driven to some abatement 
of my hitherto unqualified admiration. I began 
to be not quite sure whether the balance of his 
sentences, each so admirable by itself, did not grow 
wearisome in continuous reading, — whether it did 
not hamper his freedom of movement, as when a 
man poises a pole upon his chin. Surely he has 
not the swinging stride of Dry den, which could 
slacken to a lounge at will, nor the impassioned 
rush of Burke. Here was something of that ca- 
denced stalk which is the attribute of theatrical 
kings. And sometimes did not his thunders also 
remind us of the property-room? Though the 

^ Let me please myself by laying a sprig of rosemary (" that 's 
for remembrance ") on his grave. This friend was John Francis 
Heath, of Virginia, who took his degree in 1840. He was the 
handsomest man I have ever seen, and in eveiy manly exercise 
the most accomplished. His body was as exquisitely moulded as 
his face was beautiful. I seem to see him now taking that famous 
standing-jvimp of his, the brown curls blowing backward, or lay- 
ing his hand on his horse's neck and vaulting into the saddle. 
After leaving college he went to Germany and dreamed away nine 
years at Heidelberg. We used to call him Hamlet, he could have 
done so much and did so absolutely nothing. He died in the Con- 
federate service, in 1862. He was a good swordsman (we used to 
fence in those days), and the rumor of his German duels and of 
his intimacy with Prussian princes reached us when some fellow- 
student came home. 



46 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 

flash failed, did the long reverberation ever forget 
to follow? But there is always something over- 
passionate in the recoil of the young man from 
the idols of the boy. Even now when I am more 
temperate, however, I cannot help feeling that his 
humor is horse-play; that he is often trivial and 
not seldom slow; that he now and again misses the 
true mean that can be grave without heaviness and 
light without levity, though he would have dilated 
on that virtue of our composite tongue which ena- 
bled it to make the distinction, and would have be- 
lieved himself the first to discover it. He cannot 
be familiar unless at the cost of his own dignity and 
our respect. I sometimes question whether even 
that quality in him which we cannot but recognize 
and admire, his loftiness of mind, should not some- 
times rather be called uppishness, so often is the 
one caricatured into the other by a blusterous self- 
confidence and seK-assertion, 
He says of himself, — 

" Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art ; " 

but I am inclined to think that it was Art he loved 
most. His perennial and abiding happiness was 
in composition, in fitting word to word, and these 
into periods, like a master-workman in mosaic. 
This, perhaj)s, is why he preferred writing Latin 
verse, because in doing that the joy of composing 
was a more conscious joy. Certainly we miss in ' 
him that quality of spontaneousness, that element 
of luck, which so delights us in some of the lesser 
and all the greater poets. By his own account 



WALTER SAVAGE LAN DOR 47 

the most audacious of men, his thought and phrase 
have seldom the happy audacity of what Montaigne 
calls the first jump. Father Thames could never 
have come upon Ms stage with both his banks on 
the same side, refreshing as that innovation might 
have been to an audience familiar with the hum- 
drum habits of the river. Yet he is often content 
to think himself original when he has lashed him- 
self Into extravagance; and the reserve of his bet- 
ter style is the more remarkable that he made 
spoiled children of all his defects of character. It 
might almost seem that he sought and found an 
equipoise for his hasty violence of conduct in the 
artistic equanimity of his literary manner. I think 
he had little dramatic faculty. The creations of 
his brain do not detach themselves from it and 
become objective. He lived almost wholly in his 
own mind and in a world of his own making which 
his imagination peopled with casts after the antique. 
His "Conversations" were imaginary in a truer 
sense than he intended, for it is images rather than 
persons that converse with each other in them. 
Pericles and Phocion speak as we might fancy their 
statues to speak, — nobly indeed, but with the cold 
nobleness of marble. He had fire enough in him- 
self, but his pen seems to have been a non-conduc- 
tor between it and his personages. So little could 
he conceive the real world as something outside 
him, that nobody but himself was astonished when 
he was cast in damages at the suit of a lady to 
whom he had addressed verses that would have 
blackened Canidia. But he had done it merely as 



48 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 

an exercise in verse; it was of that he was think- 
ing, more than of her, and I doubt if she was so 
near his consciousness, or so actual to him, as the 
vile creatures of ancient Rome whose vices and 
crimes he laid at her door. Even his in every 
way admirable apothegms seem to be made out of 
the substance of his mind, and not of his experience 
or observation. And yet, with all his remoteness, 
I can think of no author who has oftener brimmed 
my eyes with tears of admiration or sympathy. 

When we have made all deductions, he remains 
great and, above all, individual. There is nothing 
in him at second-hand. The least wise of men, he 
has uttered through the mask of his interlocutors 
(if I cannot trust myself to call them characters) 
more wisdom on such topics of life and thought as 
interested or occurred to him than is to be found 
outside of Shakespeare; and that in an English 
so pure, so harmonious, and so stirringly sonorous 
that he might almost seem to have added new stops 
to the organ which Milton found sufficient for his 
needs. Though not a critic in the larger sense, — 
he was too rash for that, too much at the mercy of 
his own talent for epigram and seemingly conclusive 
statement, — no man has said better things about 
books than he. So well said are they, indeed, that 
it seems ungrateful to ask if they are always just. 
One would scruple to call him a great thinker, yet 
surely he was a man who had great thoughts, and 
when he was in the right mood these seam the am- 
ple heaven of his discourse like meteoric showers. 
He was hardly a great poet, yet he has written 



WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 49 

some of the most simply and conclusively perfect 
lines that our own or any other langiiage can show. 
They float stately as swans on the tamer level of 
his ordinary verse. Some of his shorter poems are 
perfect as crystals. His metaphors are nobly ori- 
ginal; they stand out in their bare grandeur like 
statues against a Ijackground of sky; his similes 
are fresh, and from nature ; he plucks them as he 
goes, like wild -flowers, nor interrupts his talk. 
An intellectual likeness between him and Ben Jon- 
son constantly suggests itself to me. Both had 
burly minds with much apparent coarseness of fibre, 
yet with singular delicacy of temperament. 

In politics he was generally extravagant, yet so 
long ago as 1812 he was wise enough (in a letter to 
Southey) to call war between England and America 
civil war, though he would not have been himself if 
he had not added, " I detest the Americans as much 
as you do." In 1826 he proposed a plan that 
would have pacified Ireland and saved England 
sixty years of odious mistake. 

Ten or twelve years ago I tried to condense my 
judgment of him into a pair of quatrains, written 
in a copy of his works given to a dear young friend 
on her marriage. As they were written in a hap- 
pier mood than is habitual with me now, I may be 
pardoned for citing them here with her permission, 
and through her kindness in sending me a copy : — 

' ' A villa fair, -with many a devious walk 
Darkened with deathless laurels from the sun, 
Ample for troops of friends in mutual talk, 
Green Chartreuse for the reverie of one : 
Fixed here in marble, Rome and Athens gleam ; 



50 . . WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 

Here is Arcadia, here Elysium too ; 

Anon an English voice disturbs our dream, 

And Landor's self can Landor's spell undo." 

His books, as I seem to have hinted here, are 
especially good for reading aloud in fitly sifted 
company, and I am sure that so often as the experi- 
ment is tried this company will say, with Fran- 
cesca : — 

" Per piu fiate gli ocehi ci sospinse 
Quella lettura, e scolorocci il viso." 

Landor was fond of saying that he should sup late, 
but that the hall would be well lighted, and the 
company, if few, of the choicest. The table, in- 
deed, has been long spread, but will he sit down till 
the number of the guests is in nearer proportion to 
that of the covers? It is now forty years since the 
collected edition of his works was published, prob- 
ably, as was usual in his case, a small one. Only 
one re-impression has yet been called for. Mr. 
Forster's biography of him is a long plea for a new 
trial. It is a strange fate for .a man who has writ- 
ten so much to interest, to instruct, to delight, and 
to inspire his fellow-men. Perhaps it is useless to 
seek any other solution of the riddle than the old 
habent sua fata libelli. But I envy the man who 
has before him the reading of those books for the 
first time. He will have a sensation as profound 
as that of the peasant who wandered in to where 
Kaiser Rothbart sits stately with his knights in the 
mountain cavern biding his appointed time. 

I saw Landor but once — when I went down from 
London, by his invitation, to spend a day with him 



WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 51 

at Batli in the late summer of 1852. His friend, 
the late Mr. Kenyon, went with me, — his friend 
and that of whoever deserved or needed friendship, 
the divinely appointed amicus cttrice of mankind in 
general. For me it was and is a memorable day, 
for Landor was to me an ancient, and it seemed 
a meeting in Elysium. I had looked forward to 
it, nevertheless, with a twinge of doubt, for three 
years before I had written a review of the new 
edition of his works, in which I had discriminated 
more than had been altogether pleasing to him. 
But a guest was as sacred to Landor as to an Arab, 
and the unaffected heartiness of his greeting at 
once reassured me. I have little to tell of our few 
hours' converse, for the stream of memory, when 
it has been flowing so long as mine, gathers an 
ooze in its bed like that of Lethe, and in this the 
weightier things embed themselves past recovery, 
while the lighter, lying nearer the surface, may be 
fished up again. What I can recollect, therefore, 
illustrates rather the manner of the man than his 
matter. His personal appearance has been suffi- 
ciently described by others. I will only add, that 
the suffused and uniform ruddiness of his face, in 
which the forehead, already heightened by baldness, 
shared, and something in the bearing of his head, 
reminded me vividly of the late President Quincy, 
as did also a certain hearty resonance of speech. 
You felt yourself in the presence of one who was 
emphatically a Man, not the image of a man ; so 
emphatically, indeed, that even Carlyle thought 
the journey to Bath not too dear a price to pay for 



62 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 

seeing him, and found something royal in him. 
When I saw him he was in his seventy-eighth year, 
but erect and vigorous as in middle life. There 
was something of challenge even in the alertness of 
his pose, and the head was often thrown back like 
that of a boxer who awaits a blow. He had the 
air of the arena. I do not remember that his head 
was large, or his eyes in any way remarkable. 

After the first greetings were over, I thought 
it might please him to know that I had made a 
pilgrimage to his Fiesolan villa. I spoke of the 
beauty of its site. I could not have been more 
clumsy, had I tried. "Yes," he almost screamed, 
" and I might have been there now, but for that in- 
tol-e-rrr-a-ble woman! " pausing on each syllable 
of the adjective as one who would leave an impre- 
cation there, and making the r grate as if it were 
grinding its teeth at the disabilities which distance 
imposes on resentment. I was a little embarrassed 
by this sudden confidence, which I should not here 
betray had not Mr. Forster already laid Landor's 
domestic relations sufficiently bare. I am not sure 
whether he told me the story of his throwing his 
cook out of a window of this villa. I think he 
did, but it may have been Mr. Kenyon who told it 
me on the way back to London. The legend was, 
that after he had performed this summary act of 
justice, Mrs. Landor remonstrated with a "There, 
Walter ! I always told you that one day you would 
do something to be sorry for in these furies of 
yours." Few men can be serene under an "I al- 
ways told you so " — least of all men could Landor. 



WALTER SAVAGE LAN DOR 53 

But he saw that here was an occasion where cahn 
is more effective than tempest, and where a soft 
answer is more provoking than a hard. So he re- 
plied mildly : " Well, my dear, I am sorry, if that 
will do you any good. If I had remembered that 
our best tulip-bed was iinder that window, I 'd have 
flung the dog out of t' other." 

He spoke with his wonted extravagance (he was 
always in extremes) of Prince Louis Napoleon: "I 
have seen all the great men that have appeared in 
Europe during the last half- century, and he is the 
ablest of them all. Had his uncle had but a tithe 
of his ability, he would never have died at St. 
Helena. The last time I saw the Prince before he 
went over to France, he said to me, ' Good-bye, 
Mr. Landor; I go to a dungeon or a throne.' 
'Good-bye, Prince,' I answered. 'If you go to a 
dmigeon, you may see me again; if to a throne, 
never ! ' " He told me a long story of some Merino 
sheep that had been sent him from Spain, and 
which George III. had "stolen." He seemed to 
imply that this was a greater crime than throwing 
away the American colonies, and a perfidy of which 
only kings could be capable. I confess that I 
thought the sheep as shadowy as those of Hans in 
Luck, for I was not long in discovering that Lan- 
dor 's memory had a great deal of imagination 
mixed with it, especially when the subject was 
anything that related to himself. It was not a 
memory, however, that was malignly treacherous 
to others. 

I mentioned his brother Robert's "Fountain of 



64 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 

Arethusa;" told him how much it had interested 
me, and how particularly I had heen struck with 
the family likeness to himself in it. He assented; 
said it loas family likeness, not imitation, and 
added: "Yes, when it came out many people, even 
some of my friends, thought it was mine, and told 
me so. My answer always was, 'I wish to God I 
could have written it ! ' " He spoke of it with un- 
feigned enthusiasm, though then, I believe, he was 
not on speaking terms with his brother. When- 
ever, indeed, his talk turned, as it often would, to 
the books or men he liked, it rose to a passionate 
appreciation of them. Even iipon indifferent mat- 
ters he commonly spoke with heat, as if he had 
been contradicted, or hoped he might be. There 
was no prophesying his weather by reading the 
barometer of his face. Though the index might 
point never so steadily to Fair, the storm might 
burst at any moment. His quiet was that of the 
cyclone's pivot, a conspiracy of whirlwind. Of 
Wordsworth he spoke with a certain alienated re- 
spect, and made many abatements, not as if jeal- 
ous, but somewhat in the mood of that Athenian 
who helped ostracize Aristides. Of what he said I 
recollect only something which he has since said 
in print, but with less point. Its felicity stamped 
it on my memory. "I once said to Mr. Words- 
worth, ' One may mix as much poetry with prose 
as one likes, it will exhilarate the whole; but the 
raoment one mixes a drop of prose with poetry, it 
precipitates the whole.' He never forgave me!" 
Then followed that ringing and reduplicated laugh 
of his, so like the joyous bark of a dog when he 



WALTER SAVAGE LAND OR 55 

starts for a ramble with his master. Of course he 
did not fail to mention that exquisite sea- shell 
which Wordsworth had conveyed from Gebir to 
ornament his own mantelpiece. 

After lunch, he led us into a room the whole 
available wall-space of which was hung with pic- 
tures, nearly all early Italian. As I was already 
a lover of Botticelli, I think I may trust the judg- 
ment I then inwardly pronounced upon them, that 
they were nearly all aggressively bad. They were 
small, so that the offence of each was trifling, but 
in the aggregate they were hard to bear. I waited 
doggedly to hear him begin his celebration of them, 
dumfounded between my moral obligation to be as 
truthful as I dishonestly could and my social duty 
not to give offence to my host. However, I was 
soon partially relieved. The picture he wished 
to show was the head of a man, an ancestor, he told 
me, whose style of hair and falling collar were of 
the second quarter of the seventeenth century. 
Turning sharply on me, he asked: "Does it re- 
mind you of anybody? " Of course this was a sim- 
ple riddle; so, after a diplomatic pause of deliber- 
ation, I replied, cheerfully enough : "I think I see 
a likeness to you in it." There was an appreciable 
amount of fib in this, but I trust it may be par- 
doned me as under duress. "Eight! " he exploded, 
with the condensed emphasis of a rifle. "Does it 
remind you of anybody else?" For an instant I 
thought my retribution had overtaken me, but in a 
flash of inspiration I asked myself, "Whom would 
Landor like best to resemble?" The answer was 
easy, and I gave it forthwith: "I think I see a 



56 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 

likeness to Milton." "Right again!" he cried 
triumphantly. "It does look like me, and it does 
look like Milton. That is the portrait of my an- 
cestor, Walter Noble, Speaker of one of Charles 
First's parliaments. I was showing this portrait 
one day to a friend, when he said to me, 'Landor, 
how can you pride yourself on your descent from 
this sturdy old cavalier — you who would have cut 
off Charles's head with the worst of 'em? ' '/cut 
off his head? Never! ' 'You wouldn't? I'm 
astonished to hear you say that. What would you 
have done with him? ' 'What woidd I have done? 
Why, hanged him, like any other malefactor!'" 
This he trumpeted with such a blare of victory as 
almost made his progenitor rattle on the wall where 
he himg. Whether the portrait was that of an 
ancestor, or whether he had bought it as one suit- 
able for his story, I cannot say. If an ancestor, it 
could only have been Michael (not Walter) Noble, 
Member of Parliament (not Speaker) during the 
Civil War, and siding with the Commons against 
"the King. Landor had confoimded him with Sir 
Arnold Savage (a Speaker in Henry Seventh's 
time), whom he had adopted as an ancestor, though 
there was no probable, certainly no provable, com- 
munity of blood between them. This makes the 
anecdote only the more characteristic as an illus- 
tration of the freaks of his innocently fantastic and 
creative memory. I could almost wish my own had 
the same happy faculty, when I see how little it 
has preserved of my conversation, so largely mon- 
ologue on his part, with a man so memorable. 



WALTON.i 

1889. 

Biography in these communicative days has be- 
come so voluminous that it might seem calculated 
rather for the ninefold vitality of another domestic 
animal than for the less lavish allotment of man. 
Only such renewed leases of life could justify the 
writing or suffice for the reading of these too often 
supererogatory confidences. Only a man like the 
great Julius, who new-moulded the world and 
stamped his effigy on the coinage of political 
thought still current, has a right to so much of our 
curiosity as we are now expected to put at the ser- 
vice of an average general or bishop. "Nothing 
human is foreign to me " was said long ago, chiefly 
by the Latin Grammar, and has been received as 
the pit and gallery receive a moral sentiment which 
does not inconvenience themselves, but which they 
think likely to give the boxes an uneasy qualm. 
But biography has found out a process by which 
what is human may be so thrust upon us as to become 
mhuman, and one is often tempted to wish that a 
great deal of it might not only be made foreign to 

^ This paper was originally printed as an introduction to an edi- 
tion of Walton's Angler, edited by Mr. John Bartlett, and pub- 
lished in 1889 by Messrs. Little, Brown & Co., through whose cour- 
tesy it is included in this collection. 



58 WALTON 

us, but firmly kept so. Plutarch, a man of the 
most many-sided moral and intellectual interests, 
had a truer sense of proportion, and tempers his 
amiable discursiveness with an eye to his neigh- 
bor's dial. And in his case the very names of 
his heroes are mostly so trumpet-like as both to 
waken attention and to warrant it, ushering in the 
bearers of them like that flourish on the Eliza- 
bethan stage which told that a king was coming. 
How should Brown or Smith or any other dingy 
monosyllable of Saxon indistinction compete for 
conjuration with Pelopidas or Timoleon? Even 
within living memory Napoleon had a prodigious 
purchase in his name alone, and prettily confirmed 
the theory of Mr. Shandy. 

The modern biographer has become so indiscrim- 
inate, so unconscious of the relative importance of 
a single life to the Universe, so careless of the just 
limits whether of human interest or endurance, so 
communistic in assuming that all men are entitled 
to an equal share of what little time there is left 
in the world, that many a worthy, whom a para- 
graph from the right pen might have immmortal- 
ized, is suffocated in the trackless swamps of two 
octavos. Meditating over these grievances with 
the near prospect of a biography to write, I am 
inclined to apply what was said of States to men 
also, and call him happiest who has left fewest ma- 
terials for history. It is at least doubtful whether 
gossip gain body by bottling. In these chattering 
days when nobody who really is nobody can stir 
forth without the volunteer accompaniment of a 



WALTON 69 

brass band, when there is a certificated eye at every 
keyhole, and when the Public Informer has become 
so essential a minister to the general comfort that 
the world cannot go about its business of a morning 
till its intellectual appetite is appeased with the 
latest doings and sayings of John Doe and Richard 
Roe, there is healing in the gentlemanlike reserves 
of the past, a benign sense of seclusion, a comfort 
such as loved hands bring to fevered brows, in the 
thought of one who, like Walton, has been safe 
for two hundred years in the impregnable strong- 
hold of the grave. Malice domestic, treason, in- 
terviews, nothing can touch him further. The 
sanctities of his life, at least, cannot be hawked 
about the streets or capitalized in posters as a whet 
to the latest edition of the Peeping Tom. If it be 
the triumph of an historian to make the great high- 
ways of the olden time populous and noisy, or even 
vulgar, with their old life again, it is nevertheless 
a consolation that we may still find by-paths there, 
dumb as those through a pine forest, sacred to 
meditation and to grateful thoughts. 

Such a by-path is the life of Walton. Though 
it lead us through nearly a hundred years of his- 
tory, many of them stormy with civil or anxious 
with foreign war, the clamor of events is seldom 
importunate, and the petulant drums are muffled 
with a dreamy remoteness. So far as he himself 
could shape its course, it leads us under the shadow 
of honeysuckle hedges, or along the rushy banks of 
silence -loving streams, or through the claustral hush 
of cathedral closes, or where the shadow of the vil- 



60 WALTON 

lage churcli -tower creeps round its dial of green 
graves below, or to the company of thoughtful and 
godly men. He realized the maxim which Voltaire 
preached, but so assiduously avoided practising, — 
hene vixit qui bene latuit. He did his best to fulfil 
the apostle's injunction in studying to be quiet. 
Whether such fugitive and cloistered virtue as his 
come within the sweep of Milton's gravely cadenced 
lash or not, whether a man do not owe himself more 
to the distasteful publicity of active citizenship than 
to the petting of his own private tastes or talents, 
as Walton thought it right and found it sweet to 
do, may be a question. There can be none that 
the contemplation of such a life both soothes and 
charms, and we sigh to think that the like of it is 
possible no longer. Where now would the fugitive 
from the esj)ials of our modern life find a sanctuary 
which telegraph or telephone had not deflowered? 
I do not mean that Walton was an idle man, who, 
as time was given him for nothing, thought that he 
might part with it for nothing too. If he had 
been, I should not be writing this. He left behind 
him two books, each a masterpiece in its own sim- 
ple and sincere way, and only the contemplative 
leisure of a life like his could have secreted the pre- 
cious qualities that assure them against decay. 

But Walton's life touches the imagination at 
more points than this of its quietude and inwardness. 
It opens many windows to the fancy. Its opportu- 
nities were as remarkable as its length. Twenty- 
two years old when Shakespeare died, he lived long 
enough to have read Dryden's "Absalom and 



WALTON 61 

Achitophel." He had known Ben Jonson and 
Chillingworth and Drayton and Fuller; he had 
exchanged gossip with Antony a Wood; he was 
the friend of Donne and Wotton and King; he 
had seen George Herbert; and how many more 
sons of Memory must he not have known or seen 
in all those years so populous with men justly 
famous ! Of the outward husk of this life of his we 
know comfortably little, but of the kernel much, 
and that chiefly from such unconscious glimpses as 
he himseK has given us. 

Isaac, or (as he preferred to spell the name) 
Izaak, Walton was born at Stafford, on the 9th of 
August, 1593, of a family in the rank of substan- 
tial yeomen long established in Staffordshire. Of 
his mother not even the name is known, and of his 
father we know only that his baptismal name was 
Jervis, and that he was buried on the 11th of Feb- 
ruary, 1596-97. Surely the short and simple 
annals of the poor have been seldom more laconic 
than this. Sir Harris Nicolas, author of the first 
trustworthy Life of Walton, yielding for once to 
the biographer's weakness for appearances, says 
that he "received a good, though not, strictly 
speaking, classical education." Considering that 
absolutely nothing is known of Walton's schooling, 
the concession to historical conscientiousness made 
in the parenthetic "strictly speaking" Is amusing. 
We have the witness of documents in Walton's 
own handwriting that he could never have been 
taught even the rudiments of Latin; for he spells 
the third person singular of the perfect tense of 



62 WALTON 

ohh'e, ohiet, separate, seperate, and divided, de- 
cided. And these documents are printed by Sir 
Harris himself. After this one finds it hard to con- 
ceive what a classical education, loosely speaking, 
would be. In the list of Walton's books there is 
none that is not in English. It is enough for us 
that he contrived to ]3ick up somewhere and some- 
how a competent mastery of his mother-tongue 
(far harder because seeming easier than Latin), 
and a diction of persuasive simplicity, capable of 
dignity where that was natural and becoming, such 
as not even the universities can bestow. 

It is not known in what year he went to London. 
It has been conjectured, and with much probability, 
that he was sent thither to serve his apprenticeship 
with a relative, Henry Walton, a haberdasher. 
Of this Henry Walton nothing is known beyond 
what we are told by his will, and this shows us that 
he had connections with Staffordshire. That Izaak 
Walton gave the name of Henry to two sons in 
succession seems to show some kind of close relation 
between them and some earlier Henry. But Mr. 
Nicholls discovered in the records of the Ironmon- 
gers' Company for 1617-18 the following entry: 
"Isaac Walton was made one of the Ironmongers' 
Company by Thomas Grinsell, citizen and iron- 
monger." That Walton had relatives of this name 
appears from a legacy in his will to the widow of 
his "Cosen Grinsell." On the whole, whatever 
light is let in by this chink serves only to make the 
abundant darkness more visible. May there not 
have been another Isaac, perhaps a cousin, to dis- 



WALTON 63 

tinguish himself from whom ours gave to his sur- 
name its fantastic spelling? What is certain is 
that he was already in London in 1619. In that 
year was published the second edition of a poem, 
"The Love of Amos and Laura," which, to judge 
by all that I know of it, the dedication, must hap- 
pily have been very soon gathered to its fathers; 
but it has two points of interest. It is dedicated 
to Walton by a certain S. P., who may have been 
the Samuel Purchasof the "Pilgrims; " and in this 
dedication there are expressions which show that 
Walton's character was already, in his twenty- 
sixth year, marked by the same attractiveness and 
purity and the same aptness for friendship which 
endeared him in later life to so many good and em- 
inent men. S. P., after calling him his "more 
than thrice-beloved friend," tells him that he is 
the cause that the poem "is now as it is," and that 
it might have been called his had it been better, 
but that "No ill thing can be clothed with thy 
verse." We should infer that Walton had done 
much in the way of revision, and not only this, but 
that he was already known, among his friends at 
least, as a writer of verse himself. It is puzzling, 
however, that the first edition was published in 
1613, when Walton was barely twenty, and that 
the second differs from the first in a single word 
only. In the only known copy of this earlier edi- 
tion (which, to be sure, is otherwise imperfect) the 
dedication is not to be found. Sir Harris Nicolas 
suggests that Walton may have revised the poem in 
manuscript, but it seems altogether unlikely that he 



64 WALTON 

should have been called in as a consulting physician 
at so early an age. More than twenty years later, 
in the preface to his Life of Donne, he speaks of 
his "artless pencil," and several times elsewhere al- 
ludes to his literary inadequacy. But this depre- 
cation may have been merely a shiver of his habit- 
ual modesty, or, as is more likely, a device of his 
literary adroitness. He certainly must have had 
considerable practice in the making of verse before 
he wrote his Elegy on Donne (1633), his first pub- 
lished essay in authorship. The versification of 
this, if sometimes rather stiff, is for the most part 
firm and not inharmonious. It is easier in its gait 
than that of Donne in his Satires, and shows the 
manly influence of Jonson. 

Walton, at any rate, in course of time, attained, 
at least in prose, to something which, if it may 
not be called style, was a very charming way of 
writing, all the more so that he has an innocent 
air of not knowing how it is done. Natural en- 
dowment and predisposition may count for nine in 
ten of the chances of success in this competition; 
but no man ever achieved, as Walton sometimes 
did, a simplicity which leaves criticism helpless, 
by the mere light of nature alone. Nor am I 
speaking without book. In his Life of Herbert 
he prints a poem of Donne's addressed to Her- 
bert's mother, in which there is allusion to certain 
hymns. Walton adds a few words which seem to 
follow each other with as little forethought as the 
notes of a thrush's song: "These hymns are now 
lost to us, but doubtless they were such as they 



WALTON 65 

two now sing in Heaven." Now on the inside 
cover of his Eusebius Walton has written three 
attempts at this sentence, each of them very far 
from the concise beauty to which he at last con- 
strained himself. Simplicity, when it is not a care- 
less gift of the Muse, is the last and most painful 
achievement of conscientious self-denial. He seems 
also to have had the true literary memory, which 
stores up the apt or pleasing word for use on occa- 
sion. I have noticed more than one instance of it, 
but one must suffice. In Donne's beautiful poem, 
"A Valediction Forbidding Mourning," is this 
stanza : — 

" Dull sublunary lovers' love, 

Whose soul is sense, cannot admit 
Absence, because that doth remove 
Those things that elemented it." 

Walton felt the efficacy of the word "elemented," 
and laid it by for employment at the first vacancy. 
I find it more than once in his writings. 

Of the personal history of Walton during his life 
in London we know very little more than that he 
was living in Fleet Street in 1624, that from 1628 
to 1644 he lived in Chancery Lane, and that he 
was twice married. Perhaps the most important 
event during all these years in its value to his mind 
and character was his making the acquaintance 
of Donne, to whose preaching he was a sedulous 
listener. This acquaintance became a friendship 
by which he profited till Donne's death in 1631. 
There needs no further witness to his intelligence 
or to his worth. 



66 WALTON 

Walton's first wife, to whom he was married in 
1624, was Rachel Floud, daughter of Susannah 
Cranmer, who was the daughter of Thomas, grand- 
nephew of the martyr. By her, who died in 1640,*^ 
he had six sons and one daughter, all of whom died 
in infancy or early childhood. Six years after his 
first wife's death Walton married Anne Ken, a 
sister by the half blood of Bishop Ken. Of this 
marriage there were three children, — one son, 
Izaak, who lived but a short time; a daughter 
Anne ; and another Izaak, who survived his father, 
and died in 1719, a canon of Salisbury. 

In the third edition of "The Complete Angler" 
(1664) appear for the first time some verses by 
Walton called "The Angler's Wish." Among 
other blisses is mentioned that of hearing "my 
Clilora sing a song." In the fifth edition (1676) 
"Kenna" is substituted for "Chlora,"and the ref- 
erence to Walton's second wife is obvious. It has 
been supposed that "Chlora" was an imperfect an- 
agram for "Rachel; " and that Walton, like some 
better poets, Poe notably, had economized his in- 
spiration by serving up the same verses cold to a 
second or even third mistress; but he was inca- 
pable of svich amatory double-dealing. Sir Harris 
Nicolas, by calling attention to the dates, at least 
makes it very unlikely that he was guilty of it. 
The verses were first published twenty years after 
the death of his first wife, and the name "Kenna" 
does not appear till his second had been fourteen 
years in her grave. Sir Harris failed to remark 
that Walton uses " Chlora " as the name of a 



WALTON 61 

shepherdess in an eclogue on the restoration of 
Charles II. Confronted with this fact, the sup- 
posed anagram turns out to be a mare's-nest, like 
the "Lutero " Eossetti found in Dante's " Veltro." 
Anne Walton herself died in 1662. 

There is no certainty as to what Walton's occu- 
pation may have been further than that he was a 
tradesman of some sort, and probably, since he was 
thirty years in amassing the modest competence 
that sufficed him, in a small way. Whether large 
or small is of little interest to us, for his real busi- 
ness in this world was to write the Lives and " The 
Complete Angler," and to leave the example of a 
useful and unspotted life behind him. But it is 
amusing to find Mr. Major, with that West-End 
view of the realities of life which Englishmen of a 
certain class feel it proper to take, arguing that 
Walton's business must have been of a wholesale 
character because the place in which it was carried 
on was cramped, and moreover shared by a certain 
John Mason, hosier. One is irresistibly tempted 
to parody the notorious verse, and say, — 

" His trade was great because his shop was small." 
" What room would there have been for the display 
of goods?" asks Mr. Major, with triumphant con- 
viction, forgetting that in those days the space for 
that purpose was found in the street. Walton's 
removal to Chancery Lane may imply an enlarge- 
ment of business ; and this, so far as it goes, must 
suffice to console whoever values a man not for 
what he is, but by the round of the social ladder on 
which he happens to be standing. If the humble- 



68 WALTON 

ness of Walton's station helped him toward that 
unaffected modesty which is so gracious in him 
and so dignified, we may well be thankful for it. 

Walton seems to have done his duty as a citizen 
with exemplary fidelity. Between 1632 and 1644, 
when he moved out of the parish, the register of 
St. Dunstan's in the West shows him to have been 
successively scavenger (which Sir Harris Nicolas 
prudently deodorizes by calling it vaguely " a par- 
ish office "), juryman, constable, grand-juryman, 
overseer of the poor, and vestry -man, — enough, 
one might say, to satisfy any reasonable ambition 
for civic honors at a time when they meant honest 
work done for honest wages. 

Walton's • first appearance as an author was 
in an elegy, which, after the fashion of the day, 
accompanied the first edition of Donne's poems 
(1633). This species of verse, whether in the writ- 
ing or the reading, is generally the most dreary 
compulsory labor to which man can be doomed. 
The poet climbs the doleful treadmill without get- 
ting an inch the higher; and as we watch him we 
are wearied with the reality of a toil which seems 
to have no real object. Once in my life I have 
heard a funeral elegy which was wholly adequate. 
It was the long quavering howl of a dog under a 
window of the chamber in which his master had at 
that moment died. It was Nature's cry of grief 
and terror at first sight of Death. That faithful 
creature was not trying to say something; so far 
from it, that even the little skill in articulation 
which his race has acquired was choked in the gripe 



WALTON 69 

of such disaster. Consolation would shrink away- 
abashed from the presence of so helpless a grief. 
With elegiac poets it is otherwise, for it is of them- 
selves and of their verses that they are thinking. 
They distil a precious cordial from their tears. 
They console themselves by playing variations on 
their inconsolability. Their triumphs are won over 
our artistic sense, not over our human fellow-feeling. 
Yet now and then in the far inferior verse of far 
inferior men there will be some difficult word with 
a sob in it that moves as no artifice can move, and 
brings back to each of us his private loss with a 
strange sense of comfort in feeling that somewhere, 
no matter how far away in the past, there was one 
who had suffered like ourselves and would not be 
appeased by setting his pain to music. There is 
something of this in Walton's Elegy on Donne. I 
do not believe that he was thinking of his poetical 
paces as he wrote it ; or, if he was, he forgets them 
from time to time and falls into his natural gait. 
What he said ten years later in writing of Cart- 
wright seems true of this, — 

" Muses, I need you not, for Grief and I 
Can in your absence weaye an elegy." 

I should be yielding to my partiality for Walton 
if I called these verses poetry ; but there is at least, 
in the eloquence of their honest sorrow, a tendency 
to become so which stops little short of it, and 
which is too often missed in the carefully cadenced 
ululation of similar efforts. Here, indeed, there 
seems no effort at all, and that surely is a crowning 
mercy. There is one phrase whose laconic pathos 



70 WALTON 

I find it hard to match elsewhere. It is where he 
bids his thoughts "forget he loved me." This is 
the true good breeding of sorrow. It may as well 
be said here, once for all, that Walton was no 
poet, so far as rhythm is an essential element of 
expression. His lyrics are mechanical and club- 
footed. He succeeded best in that measure, the 
rhymed couplet of ten syllables, which detaches it- 
self least irreconcilably from prose. The nearer 
an author comes to being a poet, so much the worse 
for him should he persist in making verse the in- 
terpreter of his thought ; so much the better for 
him should he wisely abandon it for something- 
closer to the habitual dialect of men. I think that 
Walton's prose owes much of its charm to the po- 
etic sentiment in him which was denied a refuge in 
verse, and that his practice in metres may have 
given to his happier periods a measure and a music 
they would otherwise have wanted. That he had 
this practice has a direct bearing on the question 
of the authorship of "Theahna and Clearchus," of 
which I must say something at the proper time, 
Walton had not the strong passions which poets 
break to the light harness of verse, and indeed 
they and longevity such as his are foaled by dams 
of very different race. But he loved poetry, and 
the poetry he loved was generally good. He had 
also some critical judgment in it. Speaking of 
Marlowe's "Come live with me," and Raleigh's 
answer to it, he says, "They were old-fashioned 
poetry, but choicely good; I think much better 
than the strong- lines that are now in fashion in 



WALTON 71 

this critical age." His simplicity, it should seem, 
was not only a gift, but a choice as well. 

Not long before the publication of a volume of 
Donne's sermons (1640), Walton wrote a life of 
the author, which was prefixed to them. This 
piety was not volunteered, but devolved on him 
by the death of their common friend. Sir Henry 
Wotton (December, 1639), for whom he had been 
collecting the material. Donne lost nothing, and 
the world gained much, by this substitution; for 
Walton thus learned by accident where his true 
talent lay, and was encouraged to write those other 
Lives which, with this, make the volume that has 
endeared him to all who choose that their souls 
should keep good company. In a preface, beauti- 
ful alike for its form and the sentiment embodied 
in it, after a pretty apology for his own deficien- 
cies, he says, " But be this to the disadvantage of 
the person represented, certain I am it is to the 
advantage of the beholder who shall here see the 
author's [Donne] picture in a natural dress, which 
ought to beget faith in what is spoken." And 
not only that, but Walton's picture too! In this 
preference of the homely and familiar, and in an 
artlessness which is not quite so artless as it would 
fain appear, lies the charm that never stales of 
Walton's manner. He would have applied his 
friend Wotton' s verse to himself, and affirmed 
"simple truth his utmost skill," but he was also a 
painstaking artist in his own way. 

As illustrations, take this sentence from the Life 
of Donne, describing him after the death of his 
wife : — 



72 WALTON 

" Thus, as the Israelites sat mourning by the rivers of 
Babylon when they remembered Zion, so he gave some 
ease to his oppressed heart by thus venting his sorrows ; 
thus he began the day and ended the night ; ended the 
restless night and began the weary day in lamenta- 
tions." 

Or this, of the nightingale, worthy to compete with 
Crashawe's, or with Jeremy Taylor's lark: — 

" But the nightingale, another of my airy creatures, 
breathes such sweet loud music out of her little instru- 
mental throat, that it might make mankind to think mir- 
acles are not ceased. He that at midnight, when the 
very laborer sleeps securely, should hear, as I have very 
often, the clear airs, the sweet descants, the natural ris- 
ing and falling, the doubling and redoubling of her 
voice, might well be lifted above earth, and say, ' Lord, 
what music hast Thou provided for the saints in heaven, 
when Thou affordest bad men such music on earth ? " 

He had learned of his great contemporaries also 
to turn and wind those many-membered periods 
which in unskilful hands become otherwise-minded 
as a herd of swine. The passage in the Introduc- 
tion to his revised Life of Donne where he com- 
pares himself to Pompey's bondman, and that in 
the Preface to the Life of Herbert in which he 
sjDeaks of Mary Magdalene, may serve as examples ; 
and in these neither are the words caught at ran- 
dom, nor do they fall into those noble modulations 
by chance. And he could be succinct at need, as 
where he says : " He that praises Richard Hooker 
praises God, who hath given such gifts to men." 

Walton tells us that he saw the Scotch Cove- 



WALTON 73 

nanters, when in 1644 they " came marching with it 
[the Covenant] gloriously upon their pikes and in 
their hats. . . . This I saw and suffered by it," 
whether in mind or purse he leaves doubtful. In 
this year he ceased to be an inhabitant of the Parish 
of St. Dunstan; and from that time till 1650, 
when he took a house in Clerkenwell, he for the 
most part vanishes. We know incidentally that 
he was in London once in the course of the year 
1645, and once again in that of 1647. But these 
may have been flying visits, for there is no evidence 
that his second marriage (1646) took place there; 
and the statement of Antony a Wood, who knew 
him well, makes it probable that he may have spent 
at Stacfford, where he had a small property, the 
years during which he cannot be shown to have 
lived anywhere else. To a man with his opinions, 
London could not have been more amiable during 
the Long Parliament and the Protectorate than 
during the reign of Charles II. to a man of his 
morals. 

The solitude of Stafford, where, to cite his own 
words, he could 

" Linger long days by Swaynham brook," 

seems more suitable to the conception and gestation 
of such a book as "The Complete Angler" than 
London could have been to a man whose compan- 
ionable instincts were so strong that even fish- 
ing was not perfect happiness without a friend to 
share it. 

That the "Angler" was begun some years be- 



74 WALTON 

fore it was published is rendered more probable 
by Walton's saying of Marlowe's song wMch he 
quotes, that it "was made at least fifty years ago." 
He was likely to know something about Marlowe 
through his own friendship with Drayton, who was 
the first adequately to signalize the poet's merit. 
Marlowe died in 1593, and the "at least fifty 
years" would bring us down to the Stafford pe- 
riod. There are passages in Walton which lead me 
to think he may have spent abroad some part of 
the time during which he is invisible to us. He 
set great store by the advantages of foreign travel, 
and gave his son the benefit of them. 

It seems likely that he gave up business in 1644, 
and it may have been at Stafford that he saw 
some foraging party from Leslie's army which would 
not have spared his uncovenanted chickens. In- 
ternal evidence makes it likely that in 1646 he wrote 
the preface to Quarles's "Shepherd's Eclogues," 
and that he was on terms of friendly acquaintance 
with him as a brother of the angle. He may have 
borrowed the name "Clora" from Quarles. It is 
true that he has put an h into it, but his spelling is 
always according to his own lights (mostly will-o'- 
the-wisps) ; and there are people who think crystals 
less lustrous without that letter which may be picked 
up anywhere in the land of Cokayne, where it 
is dropped so often. In 1650 he published the 
"Reliquiae Wottonianae," prefixing to them a life 
of the author, printed in haste, he tells us, but cor- 
rected in later editions. The "Angler " appeared 
in 1653, and a second edition came out two years 



WALTON 75 

later. It was while he was in London during this 
latter year, probably to correct his proof-sheets, 
that he met Sanderson, who was there to perform 
the same function for the preface to a volume of 
sermons. Walton's account of this meeting is so 
characteristic that I shall quote it : — 

" About the time of his printing this excellent Preface, 
I met him accidentally in London in sad-colored clothes, 
and, God knows, far from being costly. The place of 
our meeting was near to Little Britain, where he had 
been to buy a book which he then had in his hand. We 
had no inclination to part presently, and therefore turned 
to stand in a corner under a pent-house, for it began to 
rain, and immediately the wind rose and the rain in- 
creased so much that both became so inconvenient as to 
force us into a cleanly house, where we had bread, cheese, 
ale, and a fire for our money. This rain and wind were 
so obliging to me as to force our stay there for at least 
an hour, to my great content and advantage. . . . And 
I gladly remember and mention it as an argument of 
my happiness and his great humility and condescen- 
sion." 

It is exactly as if he were telling us of it, and 
this sweet persuasiveness of the living and naturally 
cadenced voice is never wanting in Walton. It is 
indeed his distinction, and it is a very rare quality 
in writers, upon most of whom, if they ever hap- 
pily forget themselves and fall into the tone of talk, 
the pen too soon comes sputtering in. The pas- 
sage is interesting too because it illustrates both 
Walton's love of good company and his Boswellian 
sensitiveness to the attraction of superior men. 



76 WALTON 

Much as lie loved fishing, it was in the minds of 
such men that he loved best to fish. And what 
a memory was his! The place, the sad-colored 
clothes, the hook just bought, the rain and then 
the wind, the pent-house, the tavern, the bread, 
the ale, the fire, — everything is there that makes 
a picture. Then he reports Sanderson's discourse; 
and having done that, is reminded that this is a 
good time to give us a description of his person. 
In reading Walton's Lives (and no wonder Johnson 
loved them so ^) I have a feeling that I have met 
him in the street and am hearing them from his 
own lips. I ask him about Donne, let us say. He 
begins, but catching sight of some one who passes, 
gives me in parenthesis an account of him, comes 
back to Donne, and keeps on with him till some- 
body else goes by about whom he has an anecdote 
to tell; and so we get a leash of biographies in one. 
It is very delightful, and though more rambling 
than Plutarch, comes nearer to him than any other 
life-writing I can think of. Indeed, I should be 
inclined to say that Walton had a genius for ram- 
bling rather than that it was his foible. The com- 
fortable feeling he gives us that we have a definite 
purpose, mitigated with the license to forget it at 
the first temptation and take it up again as if no- 
thing had happened, thus satisfying at once the 
conscientious and the natural man, is one of Wal- 
ton's most prevailing charms. What vast bal- 

^ Gray must have loved them too, and his Ode on a Distant 
Prospect of Eton College was suggested by a passage in the Life 
of Wotton. 



WALTON- 77 

ances of leisure does he not put to our credit ! To 
read him is to go a-fishing with all its bewitching 
charms and contingencies. If there be many a dull 
reach in the stream of his discourse, where contem- 
plation might innocently lapse into slumber, it is 
full also of nooks and eddies where nothing but our 
own incompetence will balk us of landing a fine 
fish. In this story of his meeting with Sander- 
son there is another point to be noticed. Wal- 
ton's memory is always discreet, always well-bred. 
It never blabs. I think that one little fact is 
purposely omitted here, namely, who paid for the 
good cheer at the tavern. The scot was paid, to 
be sure, with "our money," but I doubt very much 
whether the poor country parson's purse were the 
lighter for it. 

In 1658 Walton published separately the second 
and revised edition of his Life of Donne, with a 
preface engagingly full of himself. I say "enga- 
gingly full," because when he speaks of himself he 
never seems to usurp on other people, but only to 
share with all mankind a confidence to which they 
had as good a right as he. In 1660 he prefixed a 
congratulatory eclogue on the Restoration to a vol- 
ume of Alexander Brome's Songs. In this he con- 
trives to bring in the praise of his friend's verses, 
and combines the tediousness of the Commendatory 
and the Birthday styles with entire success. Never 
inspired in verse, he becomes laborious unless 
where his feelings are stirred to the roots, as in the 
Elegy on Donne. 

In 1662 he was at Worcester, the guest, proba- 



78 WALTON 

bly, of his friend Bishop Morley. Here his second 
wife died and lies buried in the cathedral, with an 
inscrij)tion by him, simple and affectionate. In 
that year he removed with Morley (on his trans- 
lation) to Winchester, and there spent the rest of 
his vigorous old age. From time to time he must 
have visited Charles Cotton, whose father he had 
known. We have no record of these visits (spent 
in fishing) further than that one of them is spoken 
of in a letter of Walton as proposed in 1676. 
This was in his eighty-third year, and implies in 
him that longevity of the taste for out-of-door 
sports and of the muscle to endure their fatigues 
which are almost peculiar to Englishmen. Cotton 
was a Royalist country -gentleman with a handsome 
estate, which, after sidling safely through the in- 
tricacies of the Civil War, trickled pleasantly away 
through the chinks of its master's profusion. He 
was an excellent poet and a thorough master of 
succulently idiomatic English, which he treated 
with a country -gentlemanlike familiarity, as his 
master, Montaigne, had treated French. The two 
men loved one another, and this speaks well for 
the social charity of both. There must have been 
delicately understood and mutually respectful con- 
ventions of silence in an intimacy between the pla- 
cidly believing author of the Lives and the translator 
of him who invented the Essay. Walton loved a 
gentleman of blue blood as honestly as Johnson 
did, and was, I am sure, as sturdily independent 
withal. He could condone almost anything, that 
had no taint of personal dishonor, in a gentleman 



WALTON 79 

and a Cavalier. His nature was incapable of envy, 
and, himself of obscurest lineage, there was nothing 
he relished more keenly than the long pedigrees of 
other people. While he enjoyed, he had also, I 
fancy, not merely a sense of joint ownership, but 
perhaps of something like over -lordship, as in that 
winsome passage of the "Angler" he makes Vena- 
tor say, after describing the landscape he has been 
looking on: "As I thus sat joying in my own 
happy condition and pitying the poor rich man that 
owns this and many other pleasant groves and mead- 
ows about me, I did thankfully remember what my 
Saviour said, that the meek possess the earth." 
But with him the more noble the ancestry, the 
worse for their degenerous representative. A ped- 
igree had not the right flavor for Walton unless 
newly spiced with achievement from generation 
to generation. In his Life of Sanderson, after 
proclaiming with heraldic satisfaction that he was 
of ancient family, he blows this trumpet-blast 
against the recreant : — 

" For titles not acquired, but derived only, do but 
show us who of our ancestors have and how they have 
achieved that honor which their descendants claim and 
may not be worthy to enjoy. For if those titles descend 
to persons that degenerate into vice and break off the 
continued line of learning or valor or that virtue that 
acquired them, they destroy the very foundation upon 
which that honor was built, and all the rubbish of their 
vices ought to fall heavy on such dishonorable heads ; 
ought to fall so heavy as to degrade them of their titles 
and blast their memories with reproach and shame." 



80 WALTON 

It is plain that Walton, had he lived now, would 
have made short work with an unsavory Peer. 
It is noticeable too that he gives Learning prece- 
dence over Yalor. 

Walton had a genius for friendships and an 
amiability of nature ample for the comfortable 
housing of many at a time ; he had even a special 
genius for bishops, and seems to have known 
nearly the whole Episcopal bench of his day ; but 
his friendship, like Lamb's, did not slink away 
from a fortune out at elbows, and he had, I more 
than suspect, a curiosity hospitable enough to en- 
tertain a broken gentleman (like the Carey whom 
he speaks of having known) if he had good talk or 
narrative or honest mirth in him and producible 
on demand. His friend Alexander Brome was 
surely no precisian. But these less reputable inti- 
mates he made welcome in a back-parlor of his 
mind, away from the street and with the curtains 
drawn, as if he would fain hide them even from 
himself.^ His habitual temper sought serious and 
thoughtful company, and he valued respectability 
as a wise man must, his own self-respect as a good 
man ought. But Cotton was a man of genius,^ 
whose life was cleanlier than his Muse always 
cared to be. If he wrote the Virgil Travesty, he 

^ In Ills Life of Hooker, liaTing to speak of George Sandys, he 
mentions his Travels, and his translations in verse from the Psalms 
and Job. He is silent about his version of Ovid's Metamorphoses 
(done in Virginia), though the book was in his own library. 

^ Not yet extinct anaong his descendants. The late Lady Ma- 
rian Alf ord, besides her social talents, had every gift that Fortune 
bestows on the artist save that of poverty. 



WALTON 81 

also wrote verses which the difficult Wordsworth 
could praise, and a poem of gravely noble mood 
addressed to Walton on his Lives, in which he 
shows a knowledge of what goodness is that no bad 
man could have acquired. Let one line of it at 
least shine in my page, not as a sample but for 
its own dear sake : — 

" For in a virtuous act all good men shax*e." 

Those must have been delightful evenings which 
the two friends spent together after the day's fish- 
ing. Well into the night they must have lingered, 
with much excellent discourse of books and men, 
now serious, now playful, much personal anecdote 
and reminiscence. Perhaps it was as well that 
Dr. Morley should be at Winchester, with all re- 
spect be it said, and not forgetting that Walton 
has told us he "loved such mirth as did not make 
friends ashamed to look upon one another next 
morning." 

At Walton's request, Cotton wrote in ten days 
the treatise on fly-fishing which was added to the 
fifth edition of "The Complete Angler" in 1676. 
What he says of Walton in it is interesting, and 
the reverence he expresses for his character espe- 
cially so as coming from a man of the world. " My 
father Walton," he makes Piscator say, "will be 
seen twice in no man's company he does not like, 
and likes none but such as he believes to be very 
honest men." It should be remembered that in 
those days the word "honest" had to the initiated 
ear a political and ecclesiastical as well as a moral 



82 WALTON 

meaning. Cotton was a far better poet than Wal- 
ton, and had a more practised hand ; yet his sup- 
plement to the "Angler" wants that charm of in- 
advertency with which Walton knew how to make 
his most careful sentences waylay the ear, and his 
truly poetic sympathy with the sights and sounds 
of every-day Nature. Its chief value, I think, lies 
in this illustrative contrast. 

In 1665 Walton wrote his Life of Hooker, less 
a labor of love than the others, but containing 
that homely picture of him reading Horace as he 
tended his scanty sheep, and called away by his 
wife to rock the cradle. In 1670 came the Life of 
Herbert, written, he tells us, chiefly to please him- 
self. Some time before 1678, it is uncertain when, 
his daughter Anne became the wife of the Reverend 
William Hawkins, one of the prebends of Win- 
chester, and with them he seems to have spent his 
latter years. In that year he wrote the Life of 
Sanderson, which, as showing no sign of mental 
disrepair, is surely an almost unparalleled feat for 
a man of eighty -five. Length of days is one of 
the blessings of the Old Testament, and surely it 
might be added to the Beatitudes of the New, 
when, as with Walton, it means only a longer 
ripening, a more abundant leisure to look back- 
wards without self-reproach, and forwards with an 
assured gratitude to God for a future goodness 
like the past. There is, perhaps, if we conde- 
scend to a purely utilitarian view, no stronger 
argument for belief in a personal Deity than that 
it makes possible this ennobling sense of gratitude ; 



WALTON 83 

and in a time when such possibility has been so 
largely analyzed and refined away, Walton's 
habitual recognition of so direct and conscious an 
obligation that he cannot resist the inter jectional 
expression t»f it is a chief cause of the solace and 
refreshment we feel in reading him. As we read 
we inhale an odor from the leaves as if flowers 
from the garden of childhood had been pressed be- 
tween them, and for a moment, by the sweet sophis- 
try of association, we stand again among them 
where they grew. Here is incontaminate piety, 
wholesome as bread. It is a gush of involuntary 
emotion, like that first sincere and precious juice 
which their own weight forces from the grapes. A 
fine morning, a meadow flushed with primroses, 
are not only good in themselves, but sweeter and 
better because they give him occasion to be thank- 
ful for them. We may be wiser, but it may be 
doubted whether we are so happy, in our self- 
reliant orphanhood. He had two pleasures where 
we have but one, and that one doubtingly now that 
the shadow of the metaphysic cloud has darkened 
Nature. 

In 1683 Walton published "Thealma and Clear- 
chus, a pastoral history in smooth and easie verse 
written long since by John Chalkhill, Esq., an ac- 
quaintant and friend of Edmund Spencer" [sic]. 
The preface is dated five years earlier. The poem 
is incomplete, with this quaint note by Walton 
at the end: "And here the author died, and I 
hope the reader will be sorry." When Mr. S. W. 
Singer reprinted it in 1820 he expressed his doubts 



84 WALTON 

whether such a person as John Chalkhill had ever 
existed, and his strong suspicion that it might be a 
youthful production of Walton himself. But sev- 
eral John (or Jon) Chalkhills have since been 
imearthed; one of them (who died in 1615) being 
remotely connected with Walton through the mar- 
riage of his daughter with one of the Kens. Sir 
Harris Nicolas, who rejects Mr. Singer's suspicion 
as implying a duplicity of which honest Izaak 
would have been incapable, droUy enough fixes 
upon another John Chalkliill, Fellow of Winchester 
College, as the probable author of the poem. This 
he does with Walton's statement that the author 
was "an acquaintant and friend" of Spenser, and 
that of John Chalkhill' s monument in Winchester 
Cathedral that he died in 1679, octoge?iarkis, both 
before him. Now Spenser died in 1599 ; and this 
Chalkhill, at least, could not have known him. 
But if the other, who died in 1615, wrote " Thealma 
and Clearchus," he certainly did not write it as it 
was printed by Walton. The language is altogether 
too modern for that, unless, indeed, he was en- 
dowed with a spirit of prophecy that both foresaw 
and forestalled the changes in his mother-tongue. 
The invariable use of the possessive its and the 
elision of the e in the past participle would be con- 
clusive. The tone is also too modern, though this 
is more easily to be felt than defined in words. 
While there is nothing that compels us to accept 
Mr. Singer's suggestion as to the authorship, it is 
certain that the poem has been largely rewritten by 
somebody, and this must have been Walton. It 



WALTON 85 

has many of the characteristics of his style, — his 
discursiveness, his habit of leaving the direct track 
of narrative on the suggestion of the first inviting 
by-path, his commonplaceness of invention, and, 
what is even more suspicious, the same imperfect 
rhymes, sometimes mere assonances, which are 
found in verses admittedly his own. I find also, 
or think I find, unmistakable (though veiled) allu- 
sions to the Civil War consonant with some that 
Walton could not refrain in his acknowledged 
writings. There is almost nothing in it that sug- 
gests poetry. Indeed, I remember but a single 
happy phrase : — 

' ' in the proud deep 
She and her bold Clearchus sweetly sleep 
In those soft beds of darkness." 

There is another passage worth quoting as ap- 
plicable to Walton himself in his old age : — 

" And he was almost grown a child again, 
Yet sound in judgment, not impaired in mind, 
For age had rather the soul's parts refined 
Than any way infirmed, his wit no less 
Than 't was in youth, his memory as fresh ; 
He failed in nothing but his earthly part 
That tended to its centre, yet his heart 
Was stUl the same and beat as lustily." 

And in his preface Walton perfectly describes him- 
self in describing the real or imaginary author : — • 

" He was in his time a man generally known and as 
well beloved ; for he was humble and obliging in his be- 
havior, a gentleman, a scholar, very innocent and pru- 
dent; and indeed his whole life was useful, quiet, and 
virtuous." 



86 WALTON 

I am convinced that "Thealma and Clearclius," 
whoever may have sketched it, is mainly Walton's 
as it now stands, and I believe it to be the work of 
his middle or later life. The gap of five years be- 
tween the date of the preface and that of publica- 
tion is hard to explain if we suppose him to have 
been merely the editor. The hesitation of an au- 
thor venturing himself, even under an alias, in a 
new direction, seems a more natural explanation. 
If he was the author, I cannot agree with Arch- 
deacon Nares and Sir Harris Nicolas that the arti- 
fice was very culpable, or that Walton would have 
thought it so. The evidence internal and external 
that he was author of the two letters from "a quiet 
and comfortable [conformable ? ] citizen in London 
to two busy and factious shopkeepers in Coventry," 
published in 1680, and signed E. W., seems to 
me conclusive. Had he attributed to Chalkhill a 
poem as bad in its morals as "Thealma and Clear- 
chus " in its verse, it would have been quite another 
matter. Walton thought the poem good, or he 
would not have published it ; and the worst harm 
that could come to Chalkhill would be the reputa- 
tion of being a bad poet, — not very hard to bear 
with so many to keep him in countenance, and he 
safe under the sod for sixty-eight years. 

Whether author or editor, Walton did not live 
long to enjoy the mystification or share the suc- 
cess, if any there were. He wrote his own will in 
October, 1683 ; and on the 15th December of that 
year, to borrow the words of his granddaughter's 
epitaph, written no doubt by himself, he died in 
the ninetieth year "of his innocency." 



WALTON 87 

In his will there is this remarkable passage: 
" My worldly estate, which I have nether got by 
falsehood or flattery, or the extreme creweltyof the 
law of this nation." This cruelty, I have no doubt, 
was the po^er which the law put into the hands 
of evil landlords. On this subject Walton held 
opinions which, if put in practice, would have 
prevented the social miseries of Ireland and the 
consequent political retribution which England is 
compelled to suffer for them. This is all the more 
creditable to him because he was by temperament 
and principle conservative, and not only a friend to 
that order of the Universe which was by law estab- 
lished in Church and State, but a lover of it. He 
tells of a pitiless landlord who was a parishioner of 
Sanderson, and of Sanderson's successful dealing 
with him, and adds : — 

" It may be noted that in this age there are a sort of 
people so unlike the God of Mercy, so void of the bow- 
els of pity, that they love only themselves and children, 
love them so as not to be concerned whether the rest of 
mankind waste their days in sorrow and shame, — peo- 
ple that are cursed with riches and a mistake that no- 
thing but riches 'can make them and theirs happy." 

The character of Walton's friendships and his 
fidelity to them when prorogued by death bear am- 
ple witness to the fine quality of his nature. How 
amiably human it was he betrays at every turn, 
yet with all his bonhomie there is a dignity which 
never forgets itself or permits us to forget it. We 
may apply to him what he says of Sir Henry 
Wotton's father: that he was "a man of great 



88 WALTON 

modesty, of a most plain and single heart, of an 
ancient freedom and integrity of mind," and may 
say of him, as he says of Sir Henry himself, that 
he had "a most persuasive behavior." His friends 
loved to call him "honest Izaak." He speaks of 
his own "simplicity and harmlessness," arid tells 
us that his humor was "to be free and pleasant and 
civilly merry," and that he "hated harsh censures." 
He makes it a prime quality of the gentleman to be 
"communicable." He had no love of money, and 
compassionates those who are "condemned to be 
rich." He was a staunch royalist and church- 
man, loved music, painting, good ale, and a pipe, 
and takes care to tell us that a certain artificial 
fly " was made by a handsome woman and with a 
fine hand." But what justifies and ennobles these 
lower loves, what gives him a special and native 
aroma like that of Alexander, is that above all he 
loved the beauty of holiness and those ways of tak- 
ing and of spending life that make it wholesome 
for ourselves and our fellows. His view of the 
world is not of the widest, but it is the Delectable 
Mountains that bound the prospect. Never surely 
was there a more lovable man, nor one to whom 
love found access by more avenues of sympathy. 

There are two books which have a place by 
themselves and side by side in our literature, — 
Walton's "Complete Angler" and White's "Nat- 
ural History of Selborne;" and they are books, 
too, which have secured immortality without show- 
ing any tincture of imagination or of constructive 
faculty, in the gift of one or the other of which that 



WALTON 89 

distinction commonly lies. They neither stimulate 
thought nor stir any passionate emotion. If they 
make us wiser, it is indirectly and without attempt- 
ing it, by making us more cheerful. The purely 
literary charm of neither of them will alone au- 
thorize the place they hold so securely, though, as 
respects the "Angler," this charm must be taken 
more largely into account. They cannot be called 
popular, because they attract only a limited num- 
ber of readers, but that number is kept full by new 
recruits in every generation ; and they have survived 
every peril to which editing could expose them, 
even the crowning one of illustration. They have 
this in common, that those who love them find 
themselves growing more and more to love the au- 
thors of them too. Theirs is an immortality of 
affection, perhaps the most desirable, as it is the 
rarest, of all. I do not mean that there are no 
books in other languages, and no other books in our 
own, that invite to a similar intimacy and inspire 
the same enthusiasm of regard. "Don Quixote" 
and "Elia" appeal to the memory at once. But 
in both of these there is also the sorcery of genius, 
there is the touch of the master, as well as the shy 
personal attractiveness of the writer. In the two 
books of which I have been speaking, what prima- 
rily interests us is the unconscious revelation of the 
authors' character; and it is through the kindly 
charm of this and a certain homely inspiration 
drawn from the sources of every-day experience 
that they tighten their hold upon us. Nature had 
endowed these men with the simple skill to make 



90 WALTON 

happiness out of the cheap material that is within 
the means of the poorest of us. The good fairy- 
gave them to weave cloth of gold out of straw. 
They did not waste their time or strive to show 
their cleverness in discussing whether life were 
worth living, but found every precious moment of 
it so without seeking, or made it so without gri- 
mace, and with no thought that they were doing 
anything worth remark. Both these books are pre- 
eminently cheerful books, and have the invaluable 
secret of distilling sunshine out of leaden skies. 
They are companionable books, that tempt us out- 
of-doors and keep us there. The reader of the 
"Angler" especially finds himself growing con- 
scious of one meaning in the sixth Beatitude too 
often overlooked, — that the pure in heart shall 
see God, not only in some future and far-off sense, 
but wherever they turn their eyes. 

I have hesitated to say that Walton had style, 
because, though that quality, the handmaid of tal- 
ent and the helpmeet of genius, have left the un- 
obtrusive traces of its deft hand in certain choicer 
parts of Walton's writing, — his guest-chambers as 
it were, — yet it does by no means pervade and reg- 
ulate the whole. For in a book we feel the influ- 
ence of style everywhere, though we never catch it 
at its work, as in a house we divine the neat-handed 
ministry of woman. Walton too often leaves his 
sentences in a clutter. But there are other qualities 
which, if they do not satisfy like style, are yet even 
more agreeable, draw us nearer to an author, and 
make us happier in him. "Why try to discover 



WALTON 91 

what the charm of a book is, if only it charm? If 
I must seek a word that more than any other ex- 
plains the pleasure which Walton's way of writing 
gives us, I should say it was its innocency. It re- 
freshes like the society of children. I do not know 
whether he had humor, but there are passages that 
suggest it, as where, after quoting Montaigne's de- 
lightful description of how he played with his cat, 
he goes on : " Thus freely speaks Montaigne con- 
cerning cats," as if he had taken an undue liberty 
with them ; or where he makes a meteorologist of 
the crab, that "at a certain age gets into a dead 
fish's shell, and like a hermit dwells there alone 
studying the wind and weather; " or where he tells 
us of the pahner-worm, that "he will boldly and 
disorderly wander up and down, and not endure 
to be kept to a diet or fixed to a particular place." 
And what he says of Sanderson — that "he did 
put on some faint purposes to marry" — would 
have arrided Lamb. These, if he meant to be 
droll, have that seeming inadvertence which gives 
its highest zest to humor and makes the eye twinkle 
with furtive connivance. Walton's weaknesses, 
too, must be reckoned among his other attractions. 
He praises a meditative life, and with evident sin- 
cerity ; but we feel that he liked nothing so well as 
good talk. His credulity leaves front and back 
door invitingly open. For this I rather praise than 
censure him, since it brought him the chance of a 
miracle at any odd moment, and this complacency 
of belief was but a lower form of the same quality 
of mind that in more serious questions gave him his 



92 WALTON 

equanimity of faith. And how persuasively beau- 
tiful that equanimity is ! Heaven was always as 
real to him as to us are countries we have seen only 
in the map, and so near that he caught wafts of the 
singing there when the wind was in the right quar- 
ter. I must not forget Walton's singular and gen- 
uine love of Nature and his poetical sympathy with 
it, less common then than now when "all have got 
the seed." This love was not in the Ercles vein 
such as is now in fashion, but tender and true, and 
expresses itseK not deliberately but in caressing 
ejaculations, as where he speaks of "the little liv- 
ing creatures with which the sun and summer adorn 
and beautify the river-banks and meadows . . . 
whose life, they say, Nature intended not to exceed 
an hour, and yet that life is made shorter by other 
flies or by accident." What far-reaching pity in 
this concluding sigh, and how keen a sense of the 
sweetness of life, too ! In one respect, I think, he 
is peculiar, — his sensitiveness to odors. In enu- 
merating the recreations of man, he reckons sweet 
smells among them. It is Venator who says this, 
to be sure; but in the "Angler " there is absolutely 
no dramatic sense, and it is always Walton who 
speaks. A part of our entertainment, indeed, is to 
see him doubling so many parts and all the while 
so unmistakably himself. 

Walton certainly cannot be called original in the 
sense that he opened new paths to thought or new 
vistas to imagination. Such men are rare, but al- 
most as rare are those who have force enough of 
nature to suffuse whatever they write with their own 



WALTON 93 

individuality and to make a thought fresh again 
and their own by the addition of this indefinable 
supplement. This constitutes literary originality, 
and this Walton had. Whatever entered his mind 
or memory came forth again plus Izaak Walton. 
We have borrowed of the Latin mythology the 
word " genius " to express certain intellectual pow- 
ers or aptitudes which we are puzzled to define, so 
elusive are they. I have ah-eady admitted that this 
term in its ordinary acceptation cannot be applied 
to Walton. This would imply larger "draughts of 
intellectual day " than his ever were or could be. 
For we ordinarily confine it to a single species of 
power, which seems sometimes (as in Villon, Mar- 
lowe, and Poe) wholly dissociated from the rest of 
the man, and continues to haunt the ruins of him 
with its superior presence as if it were rather a 
genius loci than the natale comes qui temperat as- 
trum. In Walton's case, since a Daimon or a 
Genius would be too lofty for the business, might 
we not take the Brownie of our own Northern my- 
thology for the type of such superior endowment as 
he clearly had? We can fancy him ministered to by 
such a homely and helpful creature, — not a genius 
exactly, but answering the purpose sufficiently well, 
and marking a certain natural distinction in those 
it singles out for its innocent and sportful com- 
panionship. And it brings a blessing also to those 
who treat it kindly, as Walton did. 

Fortunate senex, ergo tua rura manehunt. 



MILTON'S "AREOPAGITICA." 

1890. 

DuEiNG the hurly-burly of the English Civil 
War, which made the bee in every man's bonnet 
buzz all the more persistently to be let forth, who- 
ever would now write to his newspaper was driven, 
for want of that safety-valve, to indite a pamphlet, 
and, as he believed that the fate of what for the mo- 
ment was deemed the Universe hung on his opin- 
ion, was eager to make it public ere the opportune 
moment should be gone by forever. Every one of 
these enthusiasts felt as Robert Owen did when 
he said to Wilberforce, "What, Sir, would you 
put off the happiness of Mankind till the next ses- 
sion of Parliament?" Every crotchet and whim- 
sey, too, became the nucleus of a sect, and, as if 
Old England could not furnish enough otherwise- 
mindedness of her own. New England sent over 
Rogers and Gorton to help in the confusion of 
tongues. All these sects, since each singly was in 
a helpless and often hateful minority, were united 
in the assertion of their right to freedom of opinion 
and to the uncurtailed utterance of whatever they 
fancied that opinion to be. Many of them, it 
should seem, could hardly fail in their mental vag- 
abondage to stumble upon the principle of universal 



MILTON'S AREOPAGITICA 95 

toleration, but none discovered anything more 
novel than that Liberty of Prophesying is good 
for Me and very bad for Thee. It is remarkable 
how beautiful the countenance of Toleration always 
looks in this partial view of it, but it is conceivable 
that any one of these heterodoxies, once in power 
and 'therefore orthodox, would have buckled round 
all dissenters the strait-waistcoat yet warm from 
the- constraint of more precious limbs. Indeed, 
this inconsistency, so concise a proof of the consist- 
ency of human nature, was illustrated when the 
General Court of Massachusetts suppressed the first 
attempt at a newspaper in 1690, and forbade the 
printing of anything "without licence first obtained 
from those appointed by the Government to grant 
the same." Williams, as was natural in one of his 
amiable temper, was more generous than the rest, 
but even he lived long enough to learn that there 
were politico-theological bores in Rhode Island 
so sedulous and so irritating that they made him 
doubt the efficacy of his own nostrum, just as the 
activity of certain domestic insects might make a 
Brahmin waver as to the sacredness of life in some 
of its lower organisms. 

The prevailing Party had also its jangling mi- 
norities whose criticisms and arguments and com- 
plaints it was convenient to suppress, and ac- 
cordingly Parliament, in June, 1643, passed an 
Ordinance to restrain unlicensed printing. They 
had so little learned how to use their newly acquired 
freedom as to be certain that they could compel 
other men to the right use of theirs. This is not 



96 MILTON'S AREOPAGITICA 

to be wondered at, for even democracies are a great 
while in finding out that everything may be left to 
the instincts of a free people save those instincts 
themselves, and that these, docile if guided gently, 
grow mutinous under unskilful driving. Parlia- 
ment was trying no new experiment, for the press, 
as if it were an animal likely to run mad and bite 
somebody at any moment, had been muzzled since 
Queen Mary's day, but they were trying over 
again, as men are wont, an experiment that had 
always failed, and in the nature of things always 
must fail. 

Unwise repression made evasion only the more 
actively ingenious, and gave it that color of right- 
eousness which is the most dangerous consequence 
of ill-considered legislation. Counsel was darkened 
by a swarm of pamphlets surreptitiously brooded 
in cellars and cocklofts. Fancy sees their authors 
fluttering round the New Light on dingy quarto 
wings and learning that Truth incautiously ap- 
proached can singe as well as shine. Every doc- 
trine inconceivable by instructed men was preached, 
and the ghost of every dead and buried heresy did 
squeak and gibber in the London streets. The 
right of private misjudgment had been exercised 
so fantastically on the Scriptures that thoughtful 
persons were beginning to surmise whether there 
were not enough explosive material between their 
covers to shatter any system of government or of 
society that ever was or will be contrived by man. 
All this was the natural result of circumstances 
wholly novel, of a universal ferment of thought or 



MILTON'S AREOPAGITICA 97 

of its many plausible substitutes, entliusiasm, fa- 
naticism, monomania, and every form of mental 
and moral bewilderment suddenly loosed from tbe 
unconscious restraints of traditional order. Tbose 
who watched the strange intellectual and ethico- 
political upheaval in New England fifty years ago 
will be at no loss for parallels to these phenomena. 
It was a state of things that should have been left 
to subside, as it had arisen, through natural causes ; 
but the powers that be always think themselves 
wiser than the laws of Nature or the axioms of 
experience. 

Two formalities were necessary for the lawful 
publication of any printed sheet. These were the 
long-established entry at Stationers' Hall and the 
license required by the new Ordinance. Men in a 
hurry to save the world before night, dissident as 
they might be in other respects, were agreed in re- 
senting these impediments and delays, and this the 
more, doubtless, because of the fees they exacted. 
Milton, who had nothing in common with such men 
except the belief in a divine mission, had in pub- 
lishing his controversial tracts quietly ignored both 
the rights of the Stationers and the injunctions of 
the Ordinance. As respects the Stationers' Com- 
pany, he should have complied with the law, since 
entry in theirs register was the only security for 
copyright, and he believed, as he tells us in his 
"Iconoclastes," that "every author should have 
the property in his work reserved to him after 
death as well as living." It was the infringement 
of their copyrights by piratical printers during the 



98 MILTON'S AREOPAGITICA 

general confusion, wliicB seems first to have moved 
the Stationers' Company to protest against the gen- 
eral violation of the laws controlling the press. 
Milton's tract on Divorce, published, like others of 
his before, without license or registry, had made a 
scandal even among those who regarded a breach 
of the Seventh Commandment as the only effective 
liniment for the sprains and bruises of matrimony. 
And indeed Milton had ventured very far in that 
dangerous direction where liberty is apt to shade 
imperceptibly into the warmer hues of license, 
though not so cynically far as Lady Mary Wortley 
Montagu afterwards went in her proposed septen- 
nial rearrangement. The Stationers seized the op- 
portunity to denounce him twice by name, first to 
a committee of the Commons, and then to a com- 
mittee of the Lords. Nothing seems to have come 
of their complaints, and indeed the attention of 
both houses must have been too much absorbed by 
more serious warfare to find time for engaging in 
this Battle of the Books. Nothing came of them, 
that is to say, on the part of Parliament, but on 
Milton's came the "Areopagitica." 

We are indebted to the painstaking and fruitful 
researches of Mr. Masson for a more precise know- 
ledge of the particulars which bring this tract into 
closer and clearer relations with the personal in- 
terests of Milton, and some such nearer concern 
was always needed as a motive to give his prose, 
in which, as he says, he worked only with his left 
hand, its fullest energy and vivacity. Nor is this 
the case with his prose only. It is true also of his 



MILTON'S AREOPAGITICA 99 

verse in those passages whicli are the most charac- 
teristically his own. Perhaps he himself was dimly 
conscious of this, for in his "Doctrine and Disci- 
pline of Divorce " he says that "when points of dif- 
ficulty are to be discussed, appertaining to the re- 
moval of unreasonable wrong and burthen from the 
perplexed life of our brothers, it is incredible how 
cold,^how dull, and how far from all fellow-feeling 
we are without the spur of self -concernment." In 
the "Areopagitica," he was not only advocating 
certain general principles, but pleading his own 
cause. The largeness of the theme absolves the 
egotism of the motive, while this again adds fervor 
to the argument and penetration to the voice of the 
advocate. The "Areopagitica" is the best known 
and most generally liked of Milton's prose writings, 
because it is the only one concerning whose subject 
the world has more nearly come to an agreement. 
In all the others except the tract concerning Educa- 
tion, and the "History of Britain " in its first edi- 
tion, there are embers of controversy which the 
ashes of two centuries cover but have not cooled. 

There is a passage in his "Second Defence" 
where Milton speaks of the "Areopagitica " as one 
section of a tripartite scheme which he had thought 
out "to the promotion of real and substantial lib- 
erty." After giving a list of his writings on mat- 
ters ecclesiastic, he says, "When, therefore, I 
perceived that there were three species of liberty 
without which scarcely any life can be completely 
led, religious, domestic or private, and civil, as I 
had already written concerning the first, and the 



100 MILTON'S AREOPAGITICA 

magistrates were strenuously active concerning the 
third, I took to myself the second or domestic. 
And, as this seemed tripartite, if marriage, if the 
education of children were to be as they should, if 
there should be liberty of philosophizing, I set forth 
my opinion not only concerning the rightful con- 
tracting of marriage, but also the dissolving thereof, 
if it should be necessary. ... I then treated more 
briefly of the education of children in a single 
small work. . . . And lastly concerning the freeing 
of the press, lest the judgment of true and false, 
of what should be published, what suppressed, 
should be in the power of a few men of little learn- 
ing and of vulgar judgment, ... I wrote in the 
proper style of an oration the 'Areopagitica. ' " 

The sub-title of this work accordingly is "a 
speech for the liberty of unlicenced printing," but 
it is much more than this. It is a plea in behalf 
of freedom of research in all directions (lihertas phi- 
losophandi), and there is in it implicitly the doc- 
trine of universal toleration. But Milton's inten- 
tion had no such scope as that, for it is plain from 
what he says elsewhere that he would have drawn 
the line on this side of Popery, of atheism, and 
most probably of whatever was immediately incon- 
venient to so firm a believer as he was in the infal- 
libility of John Milton. Such was the irony of 
Tate that he himself a few years later became a 
censor of the press. It was perhaps with an eye to 
this comic property of the whirligig of Time that 
he wrote the passage just quoted from the "Second 
Defence," in which it is implied that some things 



MILTON'S AREOPAGITICA 101 

should be suppressed. But Milton was not incon- 
sistent with himseK, however he might be so with 
the principles advocated in the "Areopagitica," as 
those who have studied his character know. He 
is never weary of insisting on the Tacitean distinc- 
tion between liberty and license, and in his "His- 
tory of Britain " says admirably well "that liberty 
hath a sharp and double edge fit only to be handled 
by just and virtuous men : to bad and dissolute it 
becomes a mischief unwieldy in their own hands." 
Anfl. if consistency be a jewel, as the proverb af- 
firms, yet it can only show its best lustre in a suit- 
able setting of circumstances. Milton was always 
a champion of freedom as he understood it, a free- 
dom "not to be won from without, but from within, 
in the right conduct and administration of life." 
Toland speaks of him as favoring "the erection of 
a perfect Democracy," but in truth no man was 
ever farther from being a democrat in the modern 
sense than he. The government that he preferred 
would have been that of a Council chosen by a 
strictly limited body of constituents and this indi- 
rectly, their function being only to choose electors 
who again should make choice of a smaller body, 
and so on through "a third or fourth sifting and 
refining of exactest- choice." His scheme aimed 
at the establishment of something like a Vene- 
tian Republic without a Doge, his experience of 
Cromwell apparently having made any monocratic 
devices distasteful to him. For the "rude multi- 
tude," as he calls it, he had an unqualified con- 
tempt, and had no more belief in the divine right 



102 MILTON'S AREOPAGITICA 

of majorities than in that of tyrants. Undoubt- 
edly when a man of Milton's temperament advo- 
cated free speech it was with the unconscious men- 
tal reservation that it should be on the right side, 
or, at any rate, that it should be speech and not 
jargon. 

There is no trustworthy evidence that the "Are- 
opagitica" produced any immediate effect, unless it 
may have been indirectly by leavening some small 
fraction of the sluggish lump of what we should 
now call public opinion. Interests more immediate 
and pressing must soon have crowded it out of 
mind, and in a few years the returning flood of 
royalism covered it, with the other prose works of 
Milton, in a deepening ooze of oblivion. So 
utterly must it have been forgotten that in 1693 
Charles Blount boldly plagiarized it imder the new 
title of " A Just Vindication of Learning and the 
Liberty of the Press by Philopatris," in which he 
had the impudence to quote a passage from the 
very book he was rifling with the condescending- 
remark "Herein I agree with Mr. Milton," as if 
it were an exception to his general way of thinking. 
Whether the tract in this vulgarized form helped 
forward the cause in behalf of which it was written 
is matter of conjecture. None of Blount's pam- 
phlets could have had any considerable vent, for 
when Gildon published " The Miscellaneous Works 
of Charles Blount, Esq.," it is evident that he 
merely bound together the several pieces which 
made up the volume, putting new title-pages to all 
save one of them, but leaving the old pagination of 



MILTON'S AREOPAGITICA 103 

each. There must therefore have been enough un- 
sold copies to serve the needs of this edition. Be 
this as it may, Blount, by means of a scurvy trick 
played on the licenser, Bohun, — a trick one is half 
inclined to forgive because of its genuine humor and 
its beneficent results, — was the immediate cause 
of events which led to the final abandonment of the 
licensing system. A full account of the affair may 
be found in Macaulay's History, where the facts 
were for the first time unearthed. Maeaulay, as 
is his wont in dealing with men whom he dislikes, 
blackens the character of Blount more than it de- 
serves, and underrates his ability. He was not an 
atheist, though, for the point of the historian's an- 
tithesis, he ought to have been, and he certainly had 
more than the talents of a third-rate pamphleteer. 
He did not live to see the triumph of his cause. 
It would be pleasant to associate Milton even indi- 
rectly with that triumph, as we might if we could 
suppose that the " Areopagitica " had first awakened 
Blount's interest in the freedom of the press. But 
in point of fact his quarrel with the licensers was 
an old one, and he merely picked up Milton's tract 
as he would a handy stone to throw at the dog he 
was pelting. After an interval of forty years the 
"Areopagitica" was reprinted with a preface by 
Themson the poet, when it was proposed once more 
to put a bridle on the press. 

It cannot be said that the prose works of Milton 
have ever been in any sense popular, or read by 
any public much more numerous than the proof- 
reader. So far as they are concerned, Milton has 



104 MILTON'S AREOPAGITICA 

had his wish and his audience has only been too 
few, whether fit or not. They do not appear to 
have tempted even the omnivorous Coleridge in his 
maturer years, though traces of their influence may 
be surmised in his earlier prose. It is curious that 
no notes upon them are to be found in his "Liter- 
ary Remains," and but a single brief remark in 
his "Table-talk," to the effect that Milton's style 
was better in Latin than in English. I find no 
evident signs of contagion from them in any great 
writers of English except Burke, who has caught 
both their qualities and their defects, unless, in- 
deed, the likeness spring from their both having 
modelled themselves on Cicero. Since 1698, when 
Toland published the first edition of them in Hol- 
land, they have been only four times reprinted. 
Nor is this want of interest to be explained by the 
fact that their matter is mainly contentious and 
polemical, for they discuss questions whose roots 
strike deeply into the bedrock of politics and mor- 
als, and where they find a crevice widen it into 
an irreconcilable cleavage of opinion. The reason 
must be sought, then, not so much in their sub- 
stance as in their method and manner. They are 
indeed for the most part the impassioned harangues 
of a supremely eloquent man, full of matter, but 
careless of the form in which he utters it; rich in 
learning, but too intent on the constant display of 
it with the cumbrous prodigality of one to whom 
such wealth is new. He had no doubt a manner 
of his own, and boasts that by means of it the au- 
thorship of his treatise on Divorce was detected 



MILTON'S AREOPAGITICA 105 

when printed anonymously. And in his "Reason 
of Church -government urged against Prelaty " he 
says, "Whether aught was imposed me by them 
that had the overlooking, or betaken to of mine 
own choice in English or other tongue, prosing or 
versing, but chiefly by this latter, the style, by 
certain vital signs it had, was likely to live." 
Time has proved this to be true of his verse, but 
not so of his prose. For in truth his prose has 
no style in the higher sense, as, for instance, the 
"Religio Medici" has. There are passages, to be 
sure, which for richness of texture, harmony of 
tone, and artistic distribution of parts, can hardly 
be matched in our language, but that equable dis- 
tinction which is the constant note of his verse is 
wanting. A sentence builded majestically with 
every help of art and imagination too often thrusts 
heavenward from a huddle of vulgar pentices such 
as used to cluster about mediaeval cathedrals. 
Never was such inequality. It is as if some tran- 
scendent voice in mid soar of the Kyrie Eleison 
should drop into a comic song. His sentences are 
often loutish and difficult, in controversy he is 
brutal, and at any the most inopportune moment 
capable of an incredible coarseness. Let a single 
instance from his "Reformation in England" suf- 
fice, where he speaks of "that queasy temper of 
lidiewarmness that gives a vomit to God himself." 
'Jeremy Taylor is often coarse, but never to the 
degree of disgust. Strangely enough, too, Milton 
is careless of euphony, seeming to prefer words not 
only low but harsh, and such cacophonous superla- 



106 MILTON'S AREOPAGITICA 

tives as "virtuousest," "viciousest," "sheepishest," 
even making the last two hiss in the same sentence. 
Perhaps he is at his worst when he fancies that he 
is being playful and humorous (dangerous tight- 
ropes for an insupportable foot like his), and, as 
he says in his "Animadversions upon the Remon- 
strant's Defence," "mixes here and there a grim 
laughter such as may appear at the same time in 
an austere visage." Grim laughter it is indeed. 
Too often also he blusters, and we are forced to 
condone in him, as he in Luther, "how far he gave 
way to his own fervent mind." It does not satisfy 
us to excuse these faults as common to the time, 
for Milton himself has taught us to expect of him 
that choice of language and that faultless marshal- 
ling of it which is of all time, and sometimes even 
in his prose there are periods which have all the 
splendor, all the dignity, and all the grave exhila- 
ration of his verse. Some virtue of his singing- 
robes seems left, as if they had not long been 
doffed. 

As a master of harmony and of easily -maintained 
elevation in English blank verse Milton has no 
rival. He was skilled in many tongues and many 
literatures ; he had weighed the value of words, 
whether for sound or sense, or where the two may 
be of mutual help. He surely, if any, was what 
he calls "a mint-master of language." He must 
have known, if any ever knew, that even in the 
"sermo pedestris " there are yet great differences 
in gait, that prose is governed by laws of modula- 
tion as exact if not so exacting as those of verse. 



MILTON'S AREOPAGITICA 107 

and that it may conjure with words as prevailingly. 
The music is secreted in it, yet often more potent 
in suggestion than that of any verse which is not 
of utmost mastery. We hearken after it as to a 
choir in the side chapel of some cathedral heard 
faintly and fitfully across the long desert of the 
nave, now pursuing and overtaking the cadences, 
only to have them grow doubtful again and elude 
the ear before it has ceased to throb with them. 
A prose sentence, then, only fulfils its entire func- 
tion when, as in some passages of the English ver- 
sion of the Old Testament, its rhythm so keeps 
time and tune with the thought or feeling that the 
reader is guided to the accentuation of the writer 
as securely as if in listening to his very voice. 
The fifth chapter of the Book of Judges is crowded 
with these triumphs of well-measured words. Are 
we not made to see as with our eyes the slow col- 
lapse of Sisera's body, as life and will forsake it, 
and then to hear his sudden fall at last in the dull 
thud of "he fell down dead," where every word 
sinks lower and lower, to stop short with the last? 
There are many noble periods in Milton's prose, 
and they are noble in a way where he is without 
competitors, for surely he is the most eloquent of 
Englishmen. But there are a half-dozen men 
either his contemporaries, or nearly so, whose prose 
is far more evenly good than his and above all 
moves with a practised ease in which his is wholly 
wanting. He prevails even with the ear less often 
than Browne, and almost never stirs the imagina- 
tion through the ear as Browne has the art to do. 



108 MILTON'S AREOPAGITICA 

He is too eagerly intent on his argument to lin- 
ger over the artifices by which it might be more 
winningly set forth. He has been taxed with Lat- 
inism, and oddly enough by Doctor Johnson, who 
I feel sure could not have read any one of his 
tracts, unless it were the "Areopagitica," for very 
wrath. He has, it is true, some Latin construc- 
tions and uses a few words (like "assert," "pre- 
varicator," "disoblige") in their radical rather 
than in their derivative meaning, but on the whole 
his language is less vitiated with verbs taken di- 
rectly from the Latin than that of most of the 
writers coeval with him. The much overrated 
Feltham, for instance, "formicates" with them, as 
he would have called it, and one might almost learn 
Latin by reading the "Vulgar Errors." It is 
Milton's English words rather that seem foreign 
to us, such as "disgospel," "disworship," "disal- 
leige," "lossless," "natureless," or "underfoot " 
and "lifeblood" used as adjectives. Sometimes 
he ventures on what would now be called an Ameri- 
canism, as where he tells us of a "loud stench." 
But the most obvious defect of his prose is, as I 
have hinted, its want of equanimity. 

He is not so truly a writer of great prose as a 
great man writing in prose, and it is really Milton 
that we seek there more than anything else. He 
is great enough when we find him to repay a thou- 
sand-fold what the search may have cost us. And 
when we meet him at his best, there is something 
in his commerce that fortifies the mind as only 
contact with a great character can. He is then a 



MILTON'S AREOPAGITICA 109 

perpetual fountain of highmindedness. In contest 
witli an adversary lie is brutally willing to strike 
below the belt, and shows as little magnanimity or 
fairness as the average editor of an American news- 
paper in dealing with a political opponent. Even 
Voltaire, hardened as were his own controversial 
nerves, was shocked by the nature of the weapons 
which Milton v/as eager to employ against Morns. 
But when he recovers possession of his true self, he 
is so at home among those things that endure, so 
amply conversant with whatever is of good report, 
so intimately conscious of a divine presence in a 
world of doubt and failure and disillusion, and of 
those spiritual ministrations symbolized by the 
prophet in the wilderness, that we listen to him as 
Adam to the angel, and the voice lingers not only 
in the ear but in the life. Mr. James Grant in 
his "Newspaper Press" says, drolly enough, of 
Coleridge, that "there was to the latest hour of his 
life a tendency, which could not be sufficiently de- 
plored, to soar into regions of unrevealed truth." 
It is this lift in Milton, rare enough among men, 
this undying instinct to soar and tempt us to venture 
our weaker wing, that gives an incomparable effi- 
cacy to those parts of his writing in prose that are 
best inspired. Here we breathe a mountain air 
in which, as Rousseau says, " a mesure qu'on ap- 
proche des regions etherees I'ame contracte quelque 
chose de leur inalterable purete." Nay, even while 
we are trudging wearily over the low and marish 
stretches of his discourse, there rises suddenly from 
before our feet a winged phrase that mounts and 



110 MILTON'S AREOPAGITICA 

carols like a lark, luring tlie mind with it to ampler 
spaces and a serener atmosphere. It is no small 
education for the nobler part of us to consort with 
one of such temper that he could say of himself 
with truth, "God intended to prove me, whether 
I durst take up alone a rightful cause against a 
world of disesteem, and found I durst." And it 
is the breath of this spirit that pours through the 
" Areopagitica " as through a trumpet, sounding 
the charge against whatever is base and recreant, 
whether in the world about us or in the ambush of 
our own natures. 



SHAKESPEARE'S "EICHARD III." 

AN ADDRESS READ BEFORE THE EDINBURGH PHILOSOPHI- 
CAL INSTITUTION. 

1883. 

After a general introduction, Mr. Lowell 
said : — 

I propose to say a few words on one of the plays 
usually attributed to Shakespeare, — a play in re- 
spect of which I .find myself in the position of Peter 
Bell, seeing little more than an ordinary primrose 
where I ought, perhaps, to see the plant and flower 
of light; I mean the play of "Richard III." Hor- 
ace Walpole wrote "Historic Doubts" concerning 
the monarch himself, and I shall take leave to 
express some about the authorship of the drama 
that bears his name. I have no intention of apply- 
ing to it a system of subjective criticism which I 
consider as untrustworthy as it is fascinating, and 
which I think has often been carried beyond its le- 
gitimate limits. But I believe it absolutely safe to 
say of Shakespeare that he never wrote deliberate 
nonsense, nor was knowingly guilty of defective me- 
tre ; yet even tests like these I would apply with 
commendable modesty and hesitating reserve, con- 
scious that the meaning of words, and still more 



112 SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD III. 

the associations they call up, have changed since 
Shakespeare's day; that the accentuation of some 
was variable, and that Shakespeare's ear may very 
likely have been as delicate as his other senses. On 
the latter point, however, I may say in passing, of 
his versification, which is often used as a test for 
the period of his plays, that Coleridge, whose sense 
of harmony and melody was perhaps finer than that 
of any other modern poet, did not allow his own 
dramatic verse the same licenses, and I might al- 
most say the same mystifications, which he esteems 
applicable in regulating or interpreting that of 
Shakespeare, ^his is certainly remarkable. For 
my own part, I am convinced that if we had Shake- 
speare's plays as he wrote them, — and not as they 
have come down to us, deformed by the careless 
hurry of the copiers-out of parts, by the emenda- 
tions of incompetent actors, and the mishearings of 
shorthand writers, — I am convinced that we should 
not find from one end of them to the other a dem- 
onstrably faulty verse or a passage obscure for any 
other reason than depth of thought or supersubtlety 
of phrase. 

I know that in saying this I am laying myself 
open to the reproach of applying common sense to 
a subject which of all others demands uncommon 
sense for its adequate treatment, — demands per- 
ception as sensitive and divination as infallible as 
the operations of that creative force they attempt 
to measure are illusive and seemingly abnormal. 
But in attempting to answer a question like that I 
have suggested, I should be guided by considera- 



SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD III. 113 

tions far less narrow. We cannot identify printed 
thoughts by the same minute comparisons that 
would serve to convict the handwriting of them. 
To smell the rose is surely quite otherwise convin- 
cing than to number its petals ; and in estimating 
that sum of qualities which we call character, we 
trust far more to general than to particular impres- 
sions. In guessing at the authorship of an anony- 
mous book, like Southey's "Doctor" or Bulwer's 
"Timon," while I might lay some stress on tricks 
of manner, I should be much less influenced by the 
fact that many passages were above or below the 
ordinary level of any author whom I suspected of 
writing it than by the fact that there was a single 
passage different in kind from his habitual tone. 
A man may surpass himself or fall short of him- 
self, but he cannot change his nature. I woiild not 
be understood to mean that common sense is always 
or universally applicable in criticism, — Dr. John- 
son's treatment of "Lycidas" were a convincing- 
instance to the contrary; but I confess I find often 
more satisfactory guidance in the illuniinated and 
illuminating common sense of a critic like Lessing, 
making sure of one landmark before he moved for- 
ward to the next, than in the metaphysical dark 
lanterns which some of his successors are in the 
habit of letting down into their own consciousness 
by way of enlightening ours. Certainly common 
sense will never suffice for the understanding or 
enjoyment of "those brave translimary things that 
the first poets had; " but it is at least a remarkably 
good prophylactic against mistaking a handsaw for 
a hawk. 



114 SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD III. 

What, then, is the nature of the general consid- 
erations which I think we ought to bear in mind 
in debating a question like this, — the authenticity 
of one of Shakespeare's plays? First of all, and 
last of all, I should put style ; not style in its nar- 
row sense of mere verbal expression, for that may 
change and does change with the growth and train- 
ing of the man, but in the sense of that something, 
more or less clearly definable, which is always and 
everywhere peculiar to the man, and either in kind 
or degree distinguishes him from all other men, — 
the kind of evidence which, for example, makes us 
sure that Swift wrote "The Tale of a Tub" and 
Scott the "Antiquary," because nobody else coidd 
have done it. Incessu 'patuit dea, and there is a 
kind of gait which marks the mind as well as the 
body. But even if we took the word "style " in that 
narrower sense which would confine it to diction and 
turn of phrase, Shakespeare is equally incompar- 
able. Coleridge, evidently using the word in this 
sense, tells us: "There 's such divinity doth hedge 
our Shakespeare round that we cannot even imitate 
his style. I tried to imitate his manner in the 
' Remorse, ' and when I had done, I found I had 
been tracking Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massin- 
ger instead. It is really very curious." Greene, 
in a well-known passage, seems to have accused 
Shakespeare of plagiarism, and there are verses, 
sometimes even a succession of verses of Greene 
himself, of Peele, and especially of Marlowe, 
which are comparable, so far as externals go, with 
Shakespeare's own. Nor is this to be wondered at 



SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD III. 115 

in men so nearly contemporary. In fact, I think 
it is evident that to a certain extent the two mas- 
ters of versification who trained Shakespeare were 
Spenser and Marlowe. Some of Marlowe's verses 
have the same trick of clinging in the ear as 
Shakespeare's. There is, for instance, that fa- 
mous description of Helen, or rather the exclama- 
tion of Faust when he first sees Helen : — 

'' Was this the face that launched a thousand ships 
And burned the topless towers of Dium ? " 

one verse of which, if I am not mistaken, lingered 
in Shakespeare's ear. But the most characteristic 
phrases of Shakespeare imbed themselves in the 
very substance of the mind, and quiver, years after, 
in the memory like arrows that have just struck and 
still feel the impulse of the bow. And no whole 
scene of Shakespeare, even in his 'prentice days, 
could be mistaken for the work of any other man; 
for give him room enough, and he is sure to betray 
himself by some quality which either is his alone, 
or his in such measure as none shared but, he. 

I am reminded of a remark of Professor Masson's 
which struck me a good deal, — that one day, when 
tired with overwork, he took up Dante, and after 
reading in it for half an hour or so, he shut the 
book and found himself saying to himself, " Well, 
this is literature ! " And I think that this may 
be applied constantly to the mature Shakespeare, 
and, in a great measure, to the young Shakespeare. 
Take a whole scene together, and there are sure to 
be passages in it of which we can say that they are 
really literature in that higher meaning of the word. 



116 SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD III. 

It is usual to divide the works of Shakespeare by 
periods, but it is not easy to do this with even an 
approach to precision unless we take the higher 
qualities of structure as a guide. As he matured, 
his plays became more and more organisms, and 
less and less mere successions of juxtaposed scenes, 
strung together on the thread of the plot. In as- 
signing periods too positively, I fancy we are apt to 
be misled a little by the imperfect analogy of the 
sister art of painting, and by the first and second 
manners, as they are called, of its great masters. 
But manual dexterity is a thing of far slower ac- 
quisition than mastery of language or the knack of 
melodious versification. The fancy of young poets 
is apt to be superabundant. It is the imagination 
that ripens with the judgment, and asserts itself as 
the shaping power in a deeper sense than belongs 
to it as a mere maker of pictures when the eyes are 
shut. Young poets, especially if they are great 
poets, learn the art of verse early, and their poeti- 
cal vocabulary sins rather by excess than defect. 
They can pick up and assimilate what is to their 
purpose with astonishing rapidity. The "Canzo- 
niere " of Dante was, at least in part, written before 
he was twenty -five; and Keats, dying not older 
than that, left behind him poems that astonish us 
as much by their maturity of style and their Attic 
grace of form as they take the ear captive by their 
music and the fancy by their opaline beauty of 
phrase. Shakespeare, surely, was as apt a scholar 
as Keats. Already in the "Venus and Adonis" 
we find verses quite as gracious in their interlacing 



SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD III. 117 

movement, and as full, almost, of picturesque sug- 
gestion, as those of his maturer hand. For exam- 
ple : — 

" Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear, 
Or lil^e a fairy trip upon the green, 
Or like a nymph, with long dishevelled hair, 
Dance on the sands and yet no footing seen." 

Shakespeare himself was pleased with these verses, 
for a famous speech of ^rospero in "The Tempest " 
has these lines : — 

" And ye that on the sands with printless feet 
Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him 
When he comes back." 

I think it is interesting to find Shakespeare improv- 
ing on a phrase of his own : it is something that 
nobody else could do. There is even greater excel- 
lence in the Sonnets — "Let me not to the mar- 
riage of true minds," and many others. The thing 
in which we should naturally expect Shakespeare 
to grow more perfect by practice and observation 
would be knowledge of stage effect, and skill in 
presenting his subject in the most telling way. 

It would be on the side of the dramatist, or of 
the playwright, perhaps I had better say, rather 
than on the side of the poet, that we should look 
for development. To him, as to Moliere, his per- 
fect knowledge of stage-business gave an enormous 
advantage. If he took a play in hand to remodel 
it for his company, it would be the experience of 
the actor much more than the genius of the poet 
that would be called into play. His work would 
lie in the direction probably of curtailment oftener 



118 SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD TIL 

tlian of enlargement; and though it is probable 
that in the immaturer plays attributed to him by 
Heming and Condell in their edition of 1623 a 
portion, greater or less, may be his, yet it is hard 
to believe that he can be called their author in any- 
thing like the same sense as we are sure he is the 
author of those works in which no other hand can 
be suspected, because no other hand has ever been 
capable of such mastery. ^ 

It must be remembered that we come to the 
reading of all the plays attributed to Shakespeare 
with the preconception that they are his. The jug- 
gler, if he wishes to give us the impression that a 
sound comes from a certain direction, long before- 
hand turns our attention that way, makes us expect 
it thence, and at last we hear it so. This shows 
the immense power that a persuasion of this kind 
has over the imagination even in regard to a thing 
so physical as sound, and in things so metaphysical 
as the plays of Shakespeare it applies with even 
more force. If we take up a play thinking it is 
his, it is astonishing how many things we excuse, 
and how many things we slur over, and so on, for 
various reasons not very satisfactory, I think, if 
strictly cross-examined. How easily a preconceived 
idea that a play is Shakespeare's may mislead even 
clever and accomplished men into seeing what they 
expect to see is proved by the number of believers 
in Ireland's clumsy forgery of Vortigern. It was 
precisely on the style, in its narrow sense of lan- 
guage and versification, that those too credulous 
persons based their judgment. The German poet 



SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD III. 119 

and critic, Tieek, believed in the Shakespearean 
authorship of all the supposititious plays, and in 
regard to one of them, at least, "The Yorkshire 
Tragedy," drew his arguments from the diction. 
Now, so far. as mere words go, the dramatists of 
Shakespeare's time all drew from the same com- 
mon fund of vocables. The movement of their 
verse, so far as it was mechanical, would naturally 
have many points of resemblance. 

As an example of the tests sometimes employed 
and successfully, but which should not be too im- 
plicitly relied upon, I will mention that which is 
called the double-ending, where there is a superflu- 
ous syllable at the end of a line. This is a favor- 
ite and often tiresome trick of Fletcher's. But 
Shakespeare also tried it now and then, as in the 
choruses of "Henry V.," which are among the fin- 
est examples of his merely picturesque writing. 

It is possible that the external manner of 
Shakespeare might have been caught and imitated 
more or less unconsciously by some of his contem- 
poraries, as it most certainly was in the next gen- 
eration, notably by Webster and Shirley. Fletcher 
was almost Shakespeare's equal in poetic senti- 
ment; and Chapman rises sometimes nearly to his 
level in those exultations of passionate seK-con- 
sciousness to which the protagonists of his tragedies 
are lifted in the supreme crisis of their fate. But 
Fletcher's sentiment seems artificial in compari- 
son, and his fancy never sings at heaven's gate 
as Shakespeare's so often does, and Chapman's 
grandeur comes dangerously near to what a friend 



120 SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD III. 

would call extravagance and an enemy bombast.^ 
There is a certain dramatic passion in Shakespeare's 
versification, too, which we find in no other of his 
coevals except Marlowe, and in him far less con- 
stantly. Detached verses, I believe, could be cited 
from far inferior men that might well pass as the 
handiwork of the great master so far as their merely 
poetical quality is concerned ; but what I mean by 
dramatic passion is that in Shakespeare's best and 
most characteristic work the very verse is inter- 
penetrated by what is going on in the mind of the 
speaker, and its movement hastened or retarded by 
his emotion rather than by the ear and choice of the 
poet. Yes, single verses, but of other men, might 
be taken for his, but no considerable sequence of 
them, and no one of his undoubted plays, taken as 
a whole, could ever hj any possibility be supposed 
to be the creation of any other poet. 

It is something very difficult to define, this im- 
pression which convinces us without argument and 
better than all argument, but it would win the ver- 
dict of whatever jury. If the play of "Cymbeline " 
had been lost, for example, and the manuscript 
were to be discovered to-morrow, who would doubt 
its authorship? Nay, in this case there are short 
passages, single verses and phrases even, that bear 
the unmistakable mint-mark of him who alone 
could ascend the highest heaven of invention; of 

^ In Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess, Amoret tells Perigot that 
she loves him 

" Dearly as swallows love the early dawn," 
which is certainly charming, hut seems much more a felicity of 
fancy than to touch the more piercing note of passion. 



SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD III. 121 

that magician of whom Dryden said so truly, 
"Within that circle none dare tread but he." And 
it is really curious, I may say in passing, — that 
verse of Dryden reminds me of it, — that almost all 
the poets who have touched Shakespeare seem to 
become inspired above themselves. The poem that 
Ben Jonson wrote in his memory has a splendor of 
movement about it that is uncommon with him, — 
a sort of rapture ; and Dryden wrote nothing finer 
than what he wrote about the greatest of poets, nor 
is any other play of his comparable in quality with 
"All for Love," composed under Shakespeare's 
immediate and obvious influence. 

There are three special considerations, three em- 
inent and singular qualities of Shakespeare, which 
more than all, or anything else, I think, set him in 
a different category from his contemporaries ; and 
it is these that I would apply as tests, not always 
or commonly, indeed, to single verses or scenes, 
but to the entire play. It has been said, with truth, 
of Byron, that there is no great poet who so often 
falls below himseK, and this is no doubt true, 
within narrower limits, of Shakespeare; but I do 
not think it would be easy to find a whole scene in 
any of his acknowledged plays where his mind 
seems at dead low tide throughout, and lays bare 
its shallows and its ooze. The first of the three 
characteristics of which I speak is his incompara- 
ble force and delicacy of poetic expression, which 
can never keep themselves hidden for long, but 
flash out from time to time like those pulses of 
pale flame with which the sky throbs at unprophe- 



122 SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD III. 

siable intervals, as if in involuntary betrayal of the 
coming Northern Lights. Such gleams occur in 
"Love's Labour's Lost," and still more frequently 
in "A Midsummer -Night's Dream;" and here I 
choose my examples designedly from plays which 
are known to be early, and provably early, though 
it would be perfectly fair, since it is with natural 
and not acquired qualities that we are concerned, 
to pick them from any of his plays. Especially 
noteworthy, also, I think, are those passages in 
which a picturesque phrase is made the vehicle, as 
it were by accident, of some pregnant reflection or 
profound thought, as, for instance, in " A Midsum- 
mer-Night's Dream," where Theseus says: — 

" The lunatic, the lover, and the poet 
Are of imagination all compact." 

In all his plays we have evidence that he could not 
long keep his mind from that kind of overflow. I 
think it is sometimes even a defect that he is apt 
to be turned out of his direct course by the first 
metaphysical quibble, if I may so call it, that 
pops up in his path; but these, of course, are not 
the things by which we can judge him. 

One of the surest of these detective clews is this 
continual cropping-up (Goethe would have called 
it intrusion) of philosophical or metaphysical 
thought in the midst of picturesque imagery or 
passionate emotion, as if born of the very ecstasy 
of the language in which it is uttered. Take, for 
example, a passage from "The Two Noble Kins- 
men " which has persuaded nearly all critics that 
Shakespeare had a hand in writing that play. It 



SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD III. 123 

is Arcite's invocation of Mars. Observe how it 
begins with picture, and then deepens down into a 
condensed statement of all the main arguments that 
can be urged in favor of war : — 

" Thou mighty one that with thy power hast turned 
Green Neptune into purple ; whose approach 
Comets forewarn ; whose havoc in vast field 
Unearthed skulls proclaim ; whose breath blows down 
The teeming Ceres' f oison ; who dost pluck 
With hand armipotent from forth blue clouds 
The masoned turrets . . . 
O great corrector of enormous times, 
Shaker of o'er-rank States, thou grand decider 
Of dusty and old titles, that heal'st with blood 
The earth when it is sick, and cur'st the world 
O' th' plurisy of people ! " 

The second characteristic, of which I should ex- 
pect to see some adumbration, at least, in any un- 
mistakable work of Shakespeare would be humor, in 
which itself, and in the quality of it, he is perhaps 
more unspeakably superior to his contemporaries 
than in some other directions, — I mean in the power 
of pervading a character with humor, creating it 
out of humor, so to speak, and yet never overstep- 
ping the limits of nature or coarsening into carica- 
ture. In this no man is or ever was comparable 
with him but Cervantes. Of this humor we have 
something more than the premonition in some of 
his earliest plays. 

A third characteristic of Shakespeare is elo- 
quence; and this, of course, we expect to meet 
with, and do meet with, more abundantly in the 
historical and semi-historical plays than in those 
where the intrigue is more private and domestic. 



124 SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD III. 

If I were called upon to name any one mark more 
distinctive than another of Shakespeare's work, it 
would be this. I do not mean mere oratory, as in 
Antony's speech over the body of Caesar, but an 
eloquence of impassioned thought finding vent in 
vivid imagery. The speeches seem not to be 
composed, — they grow ; thought budding out of 
thought, and image out of image, by what seems 
a natural law of development, but by what is no 
doubt some subtler process of association in the 
speaker's mind, always gathering force and impet- 
uosity as it goes, from its own very motion. Take 
as examples the speeches of Ulysses in "Troilus 
and Cressida." 

I think these are the three qualities — sub- 
tlety of poetic expression, humor, and eloquence 
— which we should expect to find in a play of 
Shakespeare's, and especially in an historical play. 
Of each and all of these we find less in "Eichard 
III.," as it appears to me, than in any other of his 
plays of equal pretensions ; for although it is true 
that in "Richard II." there is no humorous char- 
acter, the humor of irony is many times present 
in the speeches of the king after his dethrone- 
ment. There is a gleam of humor here and there 
in "Richard III.," as where Richard rebukes 
Buckingham for saying "'zounds," — 

" do not swear, my Lord of Buckingham. ; " 

and there are many other Shakespearean touches; 
but the play as a whole appears to me always less 
than it should be, except in scenic effectiveness, to 



SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD III. 125 

be reckoned a work from Shakespeare's brain and 
hand alone, or even mainly, — less in all the qual- 
ities and dimensions that are most exclusively and 
characteristically his. This I think to be conclu- 
sive, for, as 'Goethe says very truly, if there be any 
defect in the most admirable of Shakespeare's 
plays, it is that they are more than they should be. 
The same great critic, speaking of his "Henry 
IV.," says with equal truth "that, were everything 
else that has come down to us of the same kind 
lost, [the arts of] poesy and rhetoric could be re- 
created out of it." 

The first impression made upon us by "Richard 
III." is that it is thoroughly melodramatic in con- 
ception and execution. Whoever has seen it upon 
the stage knows that the actor of Richard is sure 
to offend against every canon of taste laid down by 
Hamlet in his advice to the players. He is sure to 
tear his passion to rags and tatters ; he is sure to 
split the ears of the groundlings ; and he is sure to 
overstep the modesty of nature with every one of 
his stage strides. Now, it is not impossible that 
Shakespeare, as a caterer for the public taste, may 
have been willing that the groundlings as well as 
other people should help to fill the coffers of his 
company, and that the right kind of attraction 
should accordingly be offered them. It is therefore 
conceivable that he may have retouched or even 
added to a poor play which had already proved 
popular; but it is not conceivable that he should 
have written an entire play in violation of those 
principles of taste which we may deduce more or 
less clearly from everything he wrote. 



126 SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD TIL 

Then, again, Shakespeare's patriotism is charac- 
teristic of his plays. It is quite as intense as that 
of Burns ; and in a play dealing with a subject like 
that of "Richard III." one would expect to see 
this patriotism show itself in a rather more pro- 
nounced manner than usual, because the battle of 
Bos worth Field, with which the play ends, ended 
also a long and tragic series of wars, and estab- 
lished on the throne the grandfather of the sov- 
ereign who was reigning when the play was put 
upon the stage. Now there is one allusion, a sort 
of prophetic allusion, in this play to the succession 
of Henry VII. 's descendants to the throne; but 
if you compare it with the admirable way in which 
Shakespeare — I grant he was then older and his 
faculties more mature — has dealt with a similar 
matter in "Macbeth," in the second scene with 
the witches, which impresses our imagination al- 
most as much as it does that of the usurper him- 
self ; if we consider, moreover, that in the play of 
"Richard III." there is an almost ludicrous proces- 
sion of ghosts, — for there are eleven of them who 
pass through, speaking to Richard on the right and 
to Richmond on the left, — and . if we compare 
this with Shakespeare's treatment of the supernat- 
ural in any of his undoubted plays, I think we 
shall feel that the inferiority is not one of degree, 
but one of kind. 

I cannot conceive how anybody should believe 
that Shakespeare wrote the two speeches which 
are made to their armies by Richard and Richmond 
respectively. That of Richard is by far the better. 



1 



SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD III. 127 

and has something of the true Shakespearean ring 
in it, something of his English scorn for the up- 
start and the foreigner, notably where he calls 
Richmond 

" A' milksop, one that never in his life 
Felt so much cold as over shoes in snow," 

but that of his antagonist falls ludicrously flat 
to shame his worshippers. Compare it with the 
speech of Henry V. under the walls of Harfleur, or 
his reply to Westmoreland. I can conceive almost 
anything of Shakespeare except his being dull 
through a speech of twenty lines. I do not think he 
is ever that. He may be hyperbolical; he may be 
this, that, or the other; but whatever it is, his fault 
is not that he is didl. If it were not so late, I 
would read to you a passage from an earlier play, 
— the speech of Gaunt in "Richard II.;" and I 
am glad to refer to this, because it shows in part 
that eloquence and that intensity of patriotism 
which display themselves whenever they can find or 
make an opportunity. 

If Shakespeare undertook to remodel an already 
existing piece, we should expect to find his hand 
in the opening scene — for in these his skill is al- 
ways noticeable in arresting attention and exciting 
interest. Richard's soliloquy at the beginning of 
the play may be his in part, though there is a 
clumsiness in Richard's way of declaring himself 
a scoundrel, and in the reasons he gives for being 
one, which is helplessly ridiculous. He says : — 

" And therefore — since I cannot prove a lover, 
To entertain these fair, well-spoken days — 



128 SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD III. 

I am determined to prove a villain, 

And hate the idle pleasures of these days." 

And yet in the very next scene he wooes and wins 
Anne, though both she and Elizabeth had told him 
very frankly that they knew he was a devil. It 
would be a mistake to compare this betraying of 
himself by Richard with the cynical and almost in- 
decent frankness of lago. lago was an Italian of 
the Renaissance as Shakespeare might have divined 
him through that penetrating psychology of his; 
and I have been told that even now Italians who 
see Salvini's version of Othello sympathize rather 
with lago than with the Moor, whom they consider 
to be a dull-witted fellow, deserving the dupery of 
which he was the victim. 

Nevertheless "Richard III." is a most effective 
acting play. There are, certainly, what seem to 
be unmistakable traces of Shakespeare in some of 
the worst scenes, though I am not sure that if the 
play had been lost, and should be discovered in our 
day, this would pass without question. The solil- 
oquy of Clarence can hardly be attributed to any 
other hand, and there are gleams from time to time 
that look like manifest records of his kindling 
touch. But the scolding mob of widow queens, 
who make their billingsgate more intolerable by 
putting it into bad blank verse, and the childish 
procession of eleven ghosts seem to me very little 
in Shakespeare's style. For in nothing, as I have 
said, is he more singular and preeminent than in 
his management of the supernatural. 

I find that my time has got the better of me. 



SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD III. 129 

I shall merely ask you to read "Richard III." 
with attention, and with a comparison such as I 
have hinted at between this and other plays which 
are most nearly contemporary with it, and I there- 
fore shall not trouble you with further passages. 

It seems to me that an examination of "Rich- 
ard III." plainly indicates that it is a play which 
Shakespeare adapted to the stage, making addi- 
tions, sometimes longer and sometimes shorter ; and 
that, towards the end, either growing weary of his 
work or pressed for time, he left the older author, 
whoever he was, pretty much to himself. It would 
be interesting to follow out minutely a question 
of this kind, but that would not be possible within 
the limits of an occasion like this. It will be 
enough if I have succeeded in interesting you to a 
certain extent in a kind of discussion that has at 
least the merit of withdrawing us for a brief hour 
from the more clamorous interests and questions of 
the day to topics which, if not so important, have 
also a perennial value of their own. 

While I believe in the maintenance of classical 
learning in our universities, I never open my Shake- 
speare but I find myseK wishing that there might 
be professorships established for the expounding of 
his works as there used to be for those of Dante in 
Italy. There is nothing in all literature so stimu- 
lating and suggestive as the thought he seems to 
drop by chance, as if his hands were too full; no- 
thing so cheery as his humor ; nothing that laps us 
in Elysium so quickly as the lovely images which 
he marries to the music of his verse. He is also a 



130 SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD III. 

great master of rhetoric in teaching ns what to fol- 
low, and sometimes quite as usefully what to avoid. 
I value him above all for this : that for those who 
know no language but their own there is as much 
intellectual training to be got from the study of his 
works as from that of the works of any, I had al- 
most said all, of the great writers of antiquity. 



THE STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES.i 

1889. 

Three years ago I was one of those who gath- 
ered in the Sanders Theatre to conunemorate the 
two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of a college 
founded to perpetuate living learning chiefly by 
the help of three dead languages, the Hebrew, the 
Greek, and the Latin. I have given them that 
order of precedence which they had in the minds 
of those our pious founders. The Hebrew came 
first because they believed that it had been spoken 
by God himseK, and that it would have been the 
common speech of mankind but for the judicial in- 
vention of the modern languages at Shinar. Greek 
came next because the New Testament was written 
in that tongue, and Latin last as the interpreter 
between scholars. Of the men who stood about 
that fateful cradle swung from bough of the prime- 
val forest, there were probably few who believed 
that a book written in any living language could 
itself live. 

For nearly tv/o himdred years no modern Ian- 
guage was continuously and systematically taught 
here. In the latter half of the last century a stray 

1 An address before the Modem Language Association of 
America. 



132 STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 

Frenchman was caught now and then, and kept as 
long as he could endure the baiting of his pupils. 
After failing as a teacher of his mother-tongue, he 
commonly turned dancing-master, a calling which 
public opinion seems to have put on the same in- 
tellectual level with the other. Whatever haphaz- 
ard teaching of French there may have been was, 
no doubt, for the benefit of those youth of the 
better classes who might go abroad after taking 
their degrees. By hook or by crook some enthusi- 
asts managed to learn German,^ but there was no 
official teacher before Dr. Follen about sixty years 
ago. When at last a chair of French and Spanish 
was established, it was rather with an eye to com- 
merce than to culture. 

It indicates a very remarkable, and, I think, 
wholesome change in our way of looking at things 
that I should now be addressing a numerous So- 
ciety composed wholly of men engaged in teaching 
thoroughly and scientifically the very languages 
once deemed unworthy to be taught at all except 
as a social accomplishment or as a commercial 
subsidiary. There are now, I believe, as many 
teachers in that single department of Harvard 
College as sufficed for the entire undergraduate 
course when I took my first degree. And this 
change has taken place within two generations. 

^ Mr. George Bancroft told me that he learned German of 
Professor Sydney Willard, who, himself self-taught, had no notion 
of its pronunciation. One instructor in French we had, a little 
more than a century ago, in Albert Gallatin, a Swiss, afterwards 
eminent as a teacher in statesmanship and diplomacy. There was 
no regularly appointed tutor in French before 1806. 



STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 133 

Tc5 5' f?5r/ ^\)o /tey yiveaL fji.ep6ira)v avdpciiruu 

E<pdtae'. 

I make this familiar quotation for two reasons: 
because Chapman translates ixep6iT(x)v " divers-lan- 
guaged," which is apt for our occasion, and be- 
cause it enables me to make an easier transition 
to what I am about to say ; namely, that I rise to 
address you not without a certain feeling of em- 
barrassment. For every man is, more or less con- 
sciously, the prisoner of his date, and I must 
confess that I was a great while in emancipating 
myself from the formula which prescribed the 
Greek and Latin Classics as the canonical books 
of that infallible Church of Culture outside of 
which there could be no salvation, — none, at least, 
that was orthodox. Indeed, I am not sure that I 
have wholly emancipated myself even yet. The 
old phrases (for mere phrases they had mostly 
come to be) still sing in my ears with a pleasing if 
not a prevailing enchantment. 

The traditions which had dictated this formula 
were of long standing and of eminent respecta- 
bility. They dated back to the exemplaria Grceca 
of Horace. For centuries the languages which 
served men for all the occasions of private life 
were put under a ban, and the revival of learning- 
extended this outlawry to the literature, such as it 
was, that had found vent through them. Even 
the authors of that literature tacitly admitted the 
justice of such condemnation when they used the 
word Latin as meaning language par excellence, 
just as the Newfoundlanders say fish when they 



134 STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 

mean cod. They could be witty, eloquent, pathetic, 
poetical, competent, in a word, to every demand of 
their daily lives, in their mother-tongue, as the 
Greeks and Romans had been in theirs, but all 
this would not do ; what was so embalmed would 
not keep. All the prudent and forethoughtful 
among them accordingly were careful to put their 
thoughts and fancies, or what with them supplied 
the place of these commodities, into Latin as the 
one infallible pickle. They forgot the salt, to be 
sure, an ingredient which the author alone can 
furnish. For it is not the language in which a 
man writes, but what he has been able to make 
that language say or sing, that resists decay. Yet 
men were naturally a great while in reaching this 
conviction. They thought it was not good form, 
as the phrase is, to be pleased with what, and what 
alone, really touched them home. The reproach — 
at vestri proavi — rang deterrent in their ears. 
The author of " Partonopeus de Blois," it is true, 
plucks up a proper spirit : — 

" Cil clerc dient que n'est pas sens 
Qu'eserive estoire d'antif tens, 
Quant je nes escris en latin, 
Et que je perc mon tans enfin ; 
Cil le perdent qui ne font rien 
Moult plus que je ne fae le mien." 

And the sarcasm of the last couplet was more 
biting even than the author thought it. Those 
moderns who wrote in Latin truly nefaisoient rien^ 
for I cannot recollect any work of the kind that 
has m any sense survived as literature, unless it 



STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 135 

be the " Epistolse Obscuronim Virormn " (whose 
Latin is a part of its humor) and a few short copies 
of verse, as they used, aptly enough, to be called. 
Milton's foreign correspondence as Secretary for the 
Commonwealth was probably the latest instance of 
the use of Latin in diplomacy. 

You all remember Du Bellay's eloquent protest, 
" I cannot sufficiently blame the foolish arrogance 
and temerity of some of our nation, who, being 
least of all Greeks or Latins, depreciate and reject 
with a more than Stoic brow everything written in 
French, and I cannot sufficiently wonder at the 
strange opinion of some learned men, -who think 
our vernacular incapable of all good literature and 
erudition." When this was said, Montaigne was 
already sixteen years old, and, not to speak of the 
great mass of verse and prose then dormant in man- 
uscript, France had produced in Rabelais a great 
humorist and strangely open-eyed thinker, and in 
Villon a poet who had written at least one im- 
mortal poem, which still touches us with that pain- 
less sense of the lachrymoe rerum so consoling in 
poetry and the burthen of which 

" Ou sont les neiges d'antan ? " 

falters and fades away in the ear like the last 
stroke of Beauty's passing-bell. I must not let 
you forget that Du BeUay had formed himself on 
the classics, and that he insists on the assiduous 
study of them. "Devour them," he says, "not in 
order to imitate, but to turn them into blood and 
nutriment." And surely this always has been and 
always will be their true use. 



136 STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 

It was not long before the living languages jus- 
tified their right to exist by producing a living 
literature, but as the knowledge of Greek and Latin 
was the exclusive privilege of a class, that class 
naturally made an obstinate defence of its vested 
rights. Nor was it less natural that men like Ba- 
con, who felt that he was speaking to the civilized 
world, and lesser men, who fancied themselves 
charged with a pressing message to it, should 
choose to utter themselves in the only tongue that 
was cosmopolitan. But already such books as had 
more than a j)rovincial meaning, though written in 
what the learned still looked on as patois, were 
beginning to be translated into the other European 
languages. The invention of printing had insensi- 
bly but surely enlarged the audience which genius 
addresses. That there were persons in England 
who had learned something of French, Italian, 
Spanish, and of High and Low Dutch three cen- 
turies ago is shown by the dramatists of the day, 
but the speech of the foreigner was still generally 
regarded as something noxious. Later generations 
shared the prejudice of sturdy Abbot Samson, who 
confirmed the manor of Thorpe " cuidam Anglico 
natione . . . de cujus fidelitate plenius confidebat 
quia bonus agricola erat et quia nesciehat loqui 
Gallicey This was in 1182, but there is a still 
more amusing instance of the same prejudice so 
lately as 1668. " Erasmus hath also a notable 
story of a man of the same age, an Italian, that 
had never been in Germany, and yet he spake 
the German tongue most elegantly, being as one 



STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 137 

possessed of the Devil ; notwithstanding was cured 
by a Physician that administered a medicine which 
expelled an infinite number of worms^ whereby he 
ivas also freed of his knowledge of the German 
tongue^ ^ Dr. Ramesey seems in doubt whether 
the vermin or the language were the greater de- 
liverance. 

Even after it could no longer be maintained 
that no masterpiece could be written in a modern 
language, it was affirmed, and on very plausible 
grounds, that no masterj)iece of style could be so 
written imless after sedulous study of the ancient 
and especially of the Grecian models. This may 
have been partially, but was it entirely true ? Were 
those elements of the human mind which tease it 
with the longing for perfection in literary work- 
manship peculiar to the Greeks ? Before the new 
birth of letters, Dante (though the general scheme 
of his great poem be rather mechanical than or- 
ganic) had given proof of a style, which, where it 
is best, is so parsimonious in the number of its words, 
so goldenly sufficient in the value of them, that we 
must go back to Tacitus for a comparison, and per- 
haps not even to him for a parallel. But Dante 
was a great genius, and language curtsies to its 
natural kings. I will take a humbler instance, the 
Chantfahle of " Aucassin and Nicolete," rippling 
into song, and subsiding from it unconsciously as 
a brook. Leaving out the episode of the King of 

1 From a treatise on worms by William Ramesey, physician in 
ordinary to Charles II., which contains some very direct hints of 
the modern germ-theory of disease. 



138 STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 

Torelore, evidently thrust in for the groundlings, 
what is there like it for that unpremeditated charm 
which is beyond the reach of literary artifice and 
perhaps does not survive the early maidenhood of 
language ? If this be not style, then there is some- 
thing better than style. And is there anything so 
like the best epigrams of Meleager in grace of 
natural feeling, in the fine tact which says all and 
leaves it said imblurred by afterthought, as some 
little snatches of song by nameless French minstrels 
of five centuries ago ? 

It is instructive that, only fifty years after Du 
Bellay wrote the passage I have quoted. Bishop 
Hall was indirectly praising Sidney for having 
learned in France and brought back with him to 
England that very specialty of culture which we are 
told can only be got in ancient Greece or, at second 
hand, in ancient Rome. Speaking of some name- 
less rhymer, he says of him that 

" He knows the grace of that new elegance 
Which sweet Philisides fetched late from France."- 

And did not Spenser (^whose earliest essay in 
verse seems to have been translated from Du Bel- 
lay) form himself on French and Italian models ? 
Did not Chaucer and Gower, the shapers of our 
tongue, draw from the same sources ? Does not 
Higgins tell us in the " Mirrour for Magistrates " 
that Buckhurst, Phaer, TuberviUe, Golding, and 
Gascoygne imitated Marot ? Did not Montaigne 
prompt Bacon to his Essays and Browne (uncon- 
sciously and indirectly, it may be) to his " Religio 
Medici " ? Did not Skelton borrow his so-called 



STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 139 

Skeltonian measure from France ? Is not the verse 
of " Paradise Lost " moulded on that of the " Di- 
vina Commedia"? Did not Dryden's prose and 
Pope's verse profit by Parisian example ? Nay, in 
our own time, is it not whispered that more than 
one of our masters of style in English, and they, 
too, among the chief apostles of classic culture, 
owe more of this mastery to Paris than to Athens 
or Rome ? I am not going to renew the Battle of 
the Books, nor would I be understood as question- 
ing the rightful place so long held by ancient and 
especially by Greek literature as an element of cult- 
ure and that the most fruitful. But I hold this 
evening a brief for the Modern Languages, and am 
bound to put their case in as fair a light as I con- 
scientiously can. Your kindness has put me in a 
position where I am forced to reconsider my opin- 
ions and to discover, if I can, how far prejudice 
and tradition have had a hand in forming them. 

I will not say with the Emperor Charles V. that 
a man is as many men as he knows languages, and 
still less with Lord Burleigh that such polyglottism 
is but " to have one meat served in divers dishes." 
But I think that to know the literature of another 
language, whether dead or living matters not, gives 
us the prime benefits of foreign travel. It relieves 
us from what Richard Lassels aptly calls a " moral 
Excommunication ; " it greatly widens the mind's 
range of view, and therefore of comparison, thus 
strengthening the judicial faculty ; and it teaches 
us to consider the relations of things to each other 
and to some general scheme rather than to our- 



140 STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 

selves ; above all, it enlarges sestlietic charity. It 
has seemed to me also that a foreign language, 
quite as much as a dead one, has the advantage of 
putting whatever is written in it at just such a dis- 
tance as is needed for a proper mental perspective. 
No doubt this strangeness, this novelty, adds mnch 
to the pleasure we feel in reading the Hterature of 
other languages than our own. It plays the part 
of poet for us by putting familiar things in an un- 
accustomed way so deftly that we feel as if we had 
gained another sense and had ourselves a share in 
the sorcery that is practised on us. The words of 
our mother-tongue have been worn smooth by so 
often rubbing against our lips or minds, while the 
alien word has all the subtle emphasis and beauty 
of some new-minted coin of ancient Syracuse. In 
our critical estimates we should be on our guard 
against this charm. 

In reading such books as chiefly deserve to be 
read in any foreign language, it is wise to translate 
consciously and in words as we read. There is 
no such help to a fuller mastery of our vernacu- 
lar. It compels us to such a choosing and testing, 
to so nice a discrimination of sound, propriety, po- 
sition, and shade of meaning, that we now first 
learn the secret of the words we have been using 
or misusing all our lives, and are gradually made 
aware that to set forth even the plainest matter, as 
it should be set forth, is not only a very difficult 
thing, calling for thought and practice, but an 
afPair of conscience as well. Translating teaches 
us as nothing else can, not only that there is a best 



STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 141 

way, but that it is tlie only way. Those who have 
tried it know too well how easy it is to grasp the 
verbal meaning of a sentence or of a verse. That 
is the bird in the hand. The real meaning, the 
soul of it,' that which makes it literature and not 
jargon, that is the bird in the bush which tanta- 
lizes and stimulates with the vanishing glimpses we 
catch of it as it flits from one to another Im-king- 
place, — 

" Et fugit ad salices et se cupit ante videri." 

After all, I am driven back to my Virgil again, 
you see, for the happiest expression of what I was 
trying to say. It was these shy allurements and 
provocations of Omar Khayyam's Persian which led 
Fitzgerald to many a peerless phrase and made an 
original poet of him in the very act of translating. 
I cite this instance merely by way of hint that as 
a spur to the mind, as an open-sesame to the trear 
sures of our native vocabulary, the study of a liv- 
ing language (for literary, not linguistic, ends) 
may serve as well as that of any which we rather 
inaptly call dead. 

We are told that perfection of form can be 
learned only of the Greeks, and it is certainly true 
that many among them attained to, or developed 
out of some hereditary germ of aptitude, a sense 
of proportion and of the helpful relation of parts 
to the whole organism which other races mostly 
grope after in vain, Spenser, in the enthusiasm 
of his new Platonism, teUs us that " Soul is form, 
and doth the body make," and no doubt this is 
true of the highest artistic genius. Form without 



142 STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 

soul, the most obsequious observance of the unities, 
the most perfect a priori adjustment of parts, is a 
lifeless thing, like those machines of perpetual mo- 
tion admirable in every way but one — that they 
will not go. I believe that I understand and value 
form as much as I should, but I also believe that 
some of those who have insisted most strongly on 
its supreme worth as the shaping soul of a work of 
art have imprisoned the word " soul " in a single 
one of its many meanings and the soul itseK in a 
single one of its many functions. For the soul 
is not only that which gives form, but that which 
gives life, the mysterious and pervasive essence al- 
ways in itself beautiful, not always so in the shapes 
'which it informs, but even then full of infinite 
suggestion. In literature it is what we call genius, 
an insoluble ingredient which kindles, lights, in- 
spires, and transmits impulsion to other minds, 
wakens energies in them hitherto latent, and makes 
them startlingly aware that they too may be parts 
of the controlling purpose of the world. A book 
may be great in other ways than as a lesson in 
form, and it may be for other qualities that it is 
most precious to us. Is it nothing, then, to have 
conversed with genius ? Goethe's " Iphigenie " is 
far more perfect in form than his " Faust," which 
is indeed but a succession of scenes strung together 
on a thread of moral or dramatic purpose, yet it is 
" Faust " that we read and hold dear alike for its 
meaning and for the delight it gives us. And if we 
talk of classics ; what, then, is a classic, if it be 
not a book that forever delights, inspires, and sur- 



STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 143 

prises, — in which, and in ourselves, by its help, 
we make new discoveries every day ? What book 
has so warmly embosomed itself in the mind and 
memory of men as the Iliad? And yet surely 
not by its perfection in form so much as by the 
stately simplicity of its style, by its pathetic truth 
to nature, for so loose and discursive is its plan as 
to have supplied plausible argument for a diversity 
of ~ authorship. What work of classic antiquity 
has given the hransle^ as he would have called it, 
to more fruitful thinking than the Essays of Mon- 
taigne, the most planless of men who ever looked be- 
fore and after, a chaos indeed, but a chaos swarm- 
ing with germs of evolution ? There have been 
men of genius, like Emerson, richly seminative 
for other minds ; like Browning, full of wholesome 
ferment for other minds, though wholly destitute 
of any proper sense of form. Yet perhaps those 
portions of their writings where their genius has 
precipitated itseK in perfect, if detached and un- 
related crystals, flashing back the light of our com- 
mon day tinged with the diviner hue of their own 
nature, are and will continue to be a more precious 
and fecund possession of mankind than many 
works more praiseworthy as wholes, but in which 
the vitality is less abounding, or seems so because 
more evenly distributed and therefore less capable 
of giving that electric shock which thrills through 
every fibre of the soul. 

But Samuel Daniel, an Elizabethan poet less 
valued now than many an inferior man, has said 
something to my purpose far better than I could 



144 STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 

have said it. Nor is lie a suspicious witness, for 
he is himself a master of style. He had studied 
the art of writing, and his diction has accordingly- 
been less obscured by time than that of most of his 
contemporaries. He knew his classics, too, and his 
dullest work is the tragedy of " Cleopatra " shaped 
on a classic model, presumably Seneca, certainly 
not the best. But he had modern instincts and a 
conviction that the later generations of men had 
also their rights, among others that of speaking 
their minds in such forms as were most congenial 
to them. In answer to some one who had de- 
nounced the use of rhyme as barbarous, he wrote 
his " Defence of Rhyme," a monument of noble 
and yet impassioned prose. In this he says, " Suf- 
fer the world to enjoy that which it knows and 
what it likes, seeing whatsoever form of words doth 
move delight, and sway the affections of men, in 
what Scythian sort soever it be disposed and ut- 
tered, that is true number, measure, eloquence, and 
the perfection of speech." I think that Daniel's in- 
stinct guided him to a half-truth, which he as usual 
believed to include the other half also. For I have 
observed that truth is the only object of man's 
ardent pursuit of which every one is convinced 
that he, and he alone, has got the whole. 

I am not sure that Form, which is the artistic 
sense of decorum controlling the coordination of 
parts and ensuring their harmonious subservience 
to a common end, can be learned at all, whether of 
the Greeks or elsewhere. I am not sure that even 
Style (a lower form of the same faculty or quality, 



STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 145 

whichever it be), which has to do with the perfec- 
tion of the parts themselves, and whose triumph it 
is to produce the greatest effect with the least pos- 
sible expenditure of material, — I am not sure that 
even this c^n be taught in any school. If Sterne 
had been asked where he got that style which, 
when he lets it alone, is as perfect as any that 
I know, if Goldsmith had been asked where he 
got his, so equable, so easy without being unduly 
familiar, might they not have answered with the 
maiden in the ballad, — 

" I gat it in my mither's wame, 
Where ye '11 get never the like " ? 

But even though the susceptibility of art must 
be inborn, yet skill in the practical application of 
it to use may be increased, — best by practice, and 
very far next best by example. Assuming, how- 
ever, that either Form or Style is to be had with- 
out the intervention of our good fairy, we can get 
them, or at least a wholesome misgiving that they 
exist and are of serious import, from the French, 
as Sir Philip Sidney and so many others have 
done, as not a few are doing now. It is for other 
and greater virtues that I would frequent the 
Greeks. 

Browning, in the preface to his translation of the 
"Agamemnon," says bluntly, as is his wont, " learn- 
ing Greek teaches Greek and nothing else." One 
is sometimes tempted to think that it teaches some 
other language far harder than Greek when one 
tries to read his translation. Matthew Arnold, 
on the other hand, was never weary of insisting 



146 STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 

that the grand style could be best learned of the 
Greeks, if not of them only. I think it may be 
taught, or, at least, fruitfully suggested, in other 
ways. Thirty odd years ago I brought home with 
me from Nuremberg photographs of Peter Fischer's 
statuettes of the twelve apostles. These I used to 
show to my pupils and ask for a guess at their size. 
The invariable answer was " larger than life." 
They were really about eighteen inches high, and 
this grandiose effect was wrought by simplicity of 
treatment, dignity of pose, a large unfretted sweep 
of drapery. This object-lesson I found more telling 
than much argument and exhortation. I am glad 
that Arnold should have been so insistent, he said 
so many admirable things in maintaining his thesis. 
But I question the validity of single verses, or even 
of three or four, as examples of style, whether 
grand or other, and I think he would have made an 
opponent very uncomfortable who should have ven- 
tured to discuss Homer with as little knowledge of 
Greek as he himself apparently had of Old French 
when he commented on the " Chanson de Roland." 
He cites a passage from the poem and gives in a 
note an English version of it which is translated, 
not from the original, but from the French render- 
ing by Genin who was himself on no very intimate 
terms with the archaisms of his mother-tongue. 
With what he says of the poem I have little fault 
to find. It is said with his usual urbane discretion 
and marked by his usual steadiness of insight. But 
I must protest when he quotes four lines, apt as 
they are for his purpose, as an adequate sample, and 



STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 147 

then compares them with a most musically pathetic 
passage from Homer. Who is there that could es- 
cape undiminished from such a comparison ? Nor 
do I think that he appreciated as he should one 
quality of the poem which is essentially Homeric : 
I mean its invigorating energy, the exhilaration of 
manhood and courage that exhales from it, the same 
that Sidney felt in " Chevy Chase." I believe we 
should judge a book rather by its total effect than by 
the adequacy of special parts, and is not this effect 
moral as^ well as sesthetic ? If we speak of style, 
surely that is like good breeding, not fortuitous, 
but characteristic, the key which gives the pitch 
of the whole tune. If I should set some of the 
epithets with which Achilles lays Agamemnon 
about the ears in the first book of the Iliad in con- 
trast with the dispute between Roland and Oliver 
about blowing the olifaunt, I am not sure that 
Homer would win the prize of higher breeding. Or 
shall I cite Hecuba's 

rov iyii fxeffov iiTrap Ixoiyut 
'Effdefjievai wpoacpvtTa '? 

The " Chanson de Roland " is to me a very inter- 
esting and inspiring poem, certainly not to be 
named with the Iliad for purely literary charm, but 
equipped with the same moral qualities that have 
made that poem dearer to mankind than any other. 
When I am " moved more than with a trumpet," I 
care not greatly whether it be blown by Greek or 
Norman breath. 

And this brings me back to the application of 
what I quoted just now from Daniel. There seems 



148 STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 

to be a tendency of late to value literature and even 
poetry for their usefulness as courses of moral phi- 
losophy or metaphysics, or as exercises to put and 
keep the mental muscles in training. Perhaps the 
highest praise of a book is that it sets us thinking, 
but surely the next highest praise is that it ransoms 
us from thought. Milton tells us that he thought 
Spenser " a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas," 
but did he prize him less that he lectured in a gar- 
den of Alcina? To give pleasure merely is one, 
and not the lowest, function of whatever deserves 
to be called literature. Culture, which means the 
opening and refining of the faculties, is an excellent 
thing, perhaps the best, but there are other things 
to be had of the Muses which are also good in their 
kind. Refined pleasure is refining pleasure too, 
and teaches something in her way, though she be 
no proper schooldame. In my weaker moments I 
revert with a sigh, half deprecation, half relief, to 
the old notion of literature as holiday, as 

" The world's sweet inn from care and wearisome turmoil." 

Shall I make the ignominious confession that I 
relish Skelton's " Philip Sparowe," pet of Skelton's 
Maistres Jane, or parts of it, inferior though it be 
in form, almost as much as that more fortunate pet 
of Lesbia ? There is a wonderful joy in it to chase 
away ennui, though it may not thrill our intellect- 
ual sensibility like its Latin prototype. 

And in this mood the Modern Languages add 
largely to our resources. It may be wrong to be 
happy unless in the grand style, but it is perilously 



STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 149 

agreeable. And shall we say that the literature of 
the last three centuries is incompetent to put a 
healthy strain upon the more strenuous faculties of 
the mind? That it does not appeal to and satisfy 
the mind's loftier desires? That Dante, Machia- 
velli, Montaigne, Bacon, Shakespeare, Cervantes, 
Pascal, Calderon, Lessing, and he of Weimar in 
whom Carlyle and so many others have found their 
University, — that none of these set our thinking 
gear in motion to as good purpose as any ancient 
of them all? Is it less instructive to study the 
growth of modern ideas than of ancient? Is the 
awakening of the modern world to consciousness 
and its first tentative, then fuller, then rapturous 
expression of it, — 

" Like the new-abashed nightingale 
That slinteth first when he beginneth sing," 

" Till the fledged notes at length forsake their nests, 
Fluttering in wanton shoals," 

less interesting or less instructive to us because it 
finds a readier way to our sympathy through a pos- 
tern which we cannot help leaving sometimes on 
the latch, than through the ceremonious portal of 
classical prescription ? Goethe went to the root of 
the matter when he said, " people are always talk- 
ing of the study of the ancients ; yet what does 
this mean but apply yourself to the actual world 
and seek to express it, since this is what the 
ancients also did when they were alive?" That 
" when they were alive " has an unconscious sar- 
casm in it. I am not ashamed to confess that the 



150 STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 

jBrst stammerings of our Englisli speech liave a pa- 
thetic charm for me which I miss in the wiser and 
ampler utterances of a tongue, not only foreign to 
me as modern languages are foreign, but thickened 
in its more delicate articulations by the palsying 
touch of Time, And from the native woodnotes 
of many modern lands, from what it was once the 
fashion to call the rude beginnings of their liter- 
ature, my fancy carries away, I think, something as 
precious as Greek or Latin could have made it. 
Where shall I find the piteous and irreparable pov- 
erty of the parvenu so poignantly typified as in the 
" Lai de I'Oiselet " ? Where the secret password 
of all poetry with so haunting a memory as in 
" Count Arnaldos," — 

" Yo no cligo esta caneion 
Sino a quien eonmigo va " ? 

It is always wise to eliminate the personal equa- 
tion from our judgments of literature as of other 
things that nearly concern us. But what is so 
subtle, so elusive, so inapprehensible as this folle 
du logis f Are we to be suspicious of a book's 
good character in proportion as it appeals more 
vividly to our own private consciousness and ex- 
perience ? How are we to know to how many it 
may be making the same appeal? Is there no 
resource, then, but to go back humbly to the old 
quod semper, quod ubique, quod ah omnibus, and 
to accept nothing as orthodox literature on which 
the elder centuries have not laid their consecrating 
hands? The truth is, perhaps, that in reading 
ancient literature many elements of false judgment, 



STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 151 

partly involved in the personal equation, are inop- 
erative, or seem to be so, which, when we read a 
more nearly neighboring literature, it is wellnigh 
impossible to neutralize. Did not a part of Mat- 
thew Arnold's preference for the verses of Homer, 
with the thtmder-roll of which he sent poor old 
Thuroldus about his business, spring from a secret 
persuasion of their more noble harmony, their more 
ear-bewitching canorousness ? And yet he no doubt 
recited those verses in a fashion which would have 
disqualified them as barbarously for the ear of an 
ancient Greek as if they had been borrowed of Thu- 
roldus himself. Do we not see here the personal 
fallacy's eartip ? I fancy if we could call up the 
old jongleur and bid him sing to us, accompanied 
by his vielle, we should find in his verses a plaintive 
and not unimpressive melody such as so strangely 
moves one in the untutored song of the Tuscan 
peasant heard afar across the sun-steeped fields 
with its prolonged fondling of the assonants. 
There is no question about what is supreme in 
literature. The difference between what is best 
and what is next best is immense ; it is felt in- 
stinctively ; it is a difference not of degree but of 
kind. And yet may we not without lese-majesty 
say of books what Ferdinand says of women, — 

" for several virtues 
Have I liked several women ; never any 
With so fnll soul but some defect in her 
Did quarrel with the noblest grace she owed 
And put it to the foil " ? 

In growing old one grows less fanatically punc- 



152 STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 

tual in tlie practice of those austerities of taste 
which make too constant demands on dur self-de- 
nial. The ages have made up their minds about 
the ancients. While they are doing it about the 
moderns (and they are sometimes a little long 
about it, having the whole of time before them), 
may we not allow ourselves to take an honest 
pleasure in literature far from the highest, if you 
will, in point of form, not so far in point of sub- 
stance, if it comply more kindly with our mood or 
quicken it with oppugnancy according to our need ? 
There are books in all modern languages which 
fulfil these conditions as perfectly as any, however 
sacred by their antiquity, can do. Were the men 
of the Middle Ages so altogether wrong in prefer- 
ring Ovid because his sentiment was more in touch 
with their own, so that he seemed more neighborly ? 
Or the earlier dramatists in overestimating Seneca 
for the same reason ? Whether it be from natural 
predisposition or from some occult influence of the 
time, there are men who find in the literature of 
modern Europe a stimulus and a satisfaction which 
Athens and Rome deny them. If these books do 
not give so k;een an intellectual delight as the 
more consummate art and more musical voice of 
Athens enabled her to give, yet thej'^ establish and 
maintain, I am more than half willing to believe, 
more intimate and confiding relations with us. 
They open new views, they liberalize us as only an 
acquaintance with the infinite diversity of men's 
minds and judgments can do, they stimulate to 
thought or tease the fancy with suggestion, and in 



STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 153 

short do fairly well whatever a good book is ex- 
pected to do, what ancient literature did at the 
Revival of Learning, with an effect like that which 
the reading of Chapman's Homer had upon Keats. 
And we must not forget that the best result of 
this study of the ancients was the begetting of the 
moderns, though Dante somehow contrived to get 
bom with no help from the Greek Hera and little 
more from the Roman Lucina. " 'T is an unjust 
way of compute," says Sir Thomas Browne, " to 
magnify a weak head for some Latin abilities, and 
to undervalue a solid judgment because he knows 
not the geneaology of Hector." 

As implements of education, the modern books 
have some advantages of their own. I am told, 
and I believe, that there is a considerable number 
of not uningenuous youths, who, whether from 
natural inaptitude or want of hereditary predispo- 
sition, are honestly bored by Greek and Latin, and 
who yet would take a wholesome and vivifying in- 
terest in what was nearer to their habitual modes 
of thought and association. I would not take this 
for granted, I would give the horse a chance at 
the ancient springs before I came to the conclusion 
that he woidd not drink. No doubt, the greater 
difficulty of the ancient languages is believed by 
many to be a prime recommendation of them as 
challenging the more strenuous qualities of the 
mind. I think there are grounds for this belief, 
and was accordingly pleased to learn the other day 
that my eldest grandson was taking kindly to his 
Homer. I had rather he should choose Greek 



154 STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 

than any modern tongue, and I say this as a hint 
that I am making allowance for the personal equa- 
tion. The wise gods have put difficulty between 
man and everything that is worth having. But 
where the mind is of softer fibre, and less eager of 
emprise, may it not be prudent to open and make 
easy every avenue that leads to literature, even 
though it may not directly lead to those summits 
that tax the mind and muscle only to reward the 
climber at last with the repose of a more ethereal 
air? 

May we not conclude that modern literature, and 
the modern languages as the way to it, should have 
a more important place assigned to them in our 
courses of instruction, assigned to them moreover 
as equals in dignity, except so far as age may 
justly add to it, and no longer to be made to feel 
themselves inferior by being put below the salt ? 
That must depend on the way they are taught, and 
this on the competence and conscience of those 
who teach them. Already a very great advance has 
been made. The modern languages have nothing 
more of which to complain. There are nearly as 
many professors and assistants employed in teach- 
ing them at Harvard now as there were students 
of them when I was in college. Students did I 
say? I meant boys who consented to spend an 
hour with the professor three times a week for the 
express purjDose of evading study. Some of us 
learned so much that we could say " How do you 
do?" in several languages, and we learned little 
more. The real impediment was that we were 



STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 155 

kept forever in the elementary stage, tliat we 
could look forward to no literature that would have 
given significance to the languages and made them 
beneficent. It is very different now, and with 
the number of teachers the number of students 
has more than proportionally increased. And the 
reason is not far to seek. The study has been 
made more serious, more thorough, and therefore 
more inspiring. And it is getting to be under- 
stood that as a training of the faculties, the com- 
parative philology, at least, of the modern lan- 
guages may be made as serviceable as that of the 
ancient. The classical superstitions of the Eng- 
lish race made them especially behindhand in this 
direction, and it was long our shame that we must 
go to the Germans to be taught the rudiments of 
our mother tongue. This is no longer true. Anglo- 
Saxon, Gothic, Old High and Middle High Ger- 
man and Icelandic are all taught, not only here, 
but in all our chief centres of learning. When I 
first became interested in Old French I made a 
surprising discovery. If the books which I took 
from the College Library had been bound with 
gilt or yellow edges, those edges stuck together as, 
when so ornamented, they are wont to do till the 
leaves have been turned. No one had ever opened 
those books before. 

" I was the first that ever burst 
Into that silent sea." 

Old French is now one of the regular courses of in- 
struction, and not only is the language taught, but 
its literature as well. Remembering what I remem- 



156 STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 

ber, it seems to me a wonderful thing tliat I should 
have lived to see a poem in Old French edited by 
a young American scholar (present here this even- 
ing) and printed in the journal of this Society, 
a journal in every way creditable to the scholar- 
ship of the country. Nor, as an illustration of the 
same advance in another language, should we for- 
get Dr. Fay's admirable Concordance of the " Di- 
vina Commedia." But a more gratifying illustra- 
tion than any is the existence and fruitful activity 
of this Association itself, and this select concourse 
before me which brings scholars together from aU 
parts of the land, to stimulate them by personal 
commerce with men of kindred pursuits, and to 
unite so many scattered energies in a single force 
controlled by a common and invigorated purpose. 

We have every reason to congratulate ourselves 
on the progress the modern languages have made 
as well in academic as in popular consideration. 
They are now taught (as they could not formerly 
be taught) in a way that demands toil and thought 
of the student, as Greek and Latin, and they only, 
used to be taught, and they also open the way to 
higher intellectual joys, to pastures new and not 
the worse for being so, as Greek and Latin, and 
they only, used to do. Surely many-sidedness is the 
very essence of culture, and it matters less what a 
man learns than how he learns it. The day wiU 
come, nay, it is dawning already, when it wiU be 
understood that the masterpieces of whatever lan- 
guage are not to be classed by an arbitrary stand- 
ard, but stand on the same level in virtue of being 



STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 157 

masterpieces ; that thought, imagination, and fancy 
may make even a patois acceptable to scholars ; 
that the poets of all climes and of all ages " sing 
to one clear harp in divers tones ; " and that the 
masters of prose and the masters of verse in all 
tongues teach the same lesson and exact the same 
fee. 

I began by saying that I had no wish to renew 
the Battle of the Books. I cannot bring myself to 
look upon the literatures of the ancient and mod- 
ern worlds as antagonists, but rather as friendly 
rivals in the effort to tear as many as may be 
from the barbarizing plutolatry which seems to 
be so rapidly supplanting the worship of what 
alone is lovely and enduring. No, they are not 
antagonists, but by their points of disparity, of 
likeness, or contrast, they can be best understood, 
perhaps understood only through each other. The 
scholar must have them both, but may not he who 
has not leisure to be a scholar find profit even in 
the lesser of the two, if that only be attainable? 
Have I admitted that one is the lesser? O matre 
pulchra filia pulchrior is perhaps what I should 
say here. 

If I did not rejoice in the wonderful advance 
made in the comparative philology of the modern 
languages, I should not have the face to be stand- 
ing here. But neither should I if I shrank from 
saying what I believed to be the truth, whether here 
or elsewhere. I think that the purely linguistic 
side in the teaching of them seems in the way to 
get more than its fitting share. I insist only that 



158 STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 

in our college courses this should he a separate 
study, and that, good as it is in itself, it should, in 
the scheme of general instruction, be restrained to 
its own function as the guide to something better. 
And that something better is Literature. Let us 
rescue ourselves from what Milton calls " these 
gramniatic flats and shallows." The blossoms of 
language have certainly as much value as its roots; 
for if the roots secrete food and thereby transmit 
life to the plant, yet the joyous consummation of 
that life is in the blossoms, which alone bear the 
seeds that distribute and renew it in other growths. 
Exercise is good for the muscles of mind and to 
keep it well in hand for work, but the true end of 
Culture is to give it play, a thing quite as needful. 
What I would urge, therefore, is that no invidi- 
ous distinction should be made between the Old 
Learning and the New, but that students, due 
regard being had to their temperaments and facul- 
ties, should be encouraged to take the course in 
modern languages as being quite as good in j)omt 
of mental discipline as any other, if pursued with 
the same thoroughness and to the same end. And 
that end is Literature, for there language first 
attains to a full consciousness of its powers and 
to the delighted exercise of them. Literature has 
escaped that doom of Shinar which made our 
Association possible, and still everywhere speaks in 
the universal tongue of civilized man. And it is 
only through this record of Man's joys and sor- 
rows, of his aspirations and failures, of his thought, 
his speculation, and his dreams, that we can become 



STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 159 

complete men, and learn both wliat he is and what 
he may be, for it is the unconscious autobiography 
of mankind. And has no page been added to it 
since the last ancient classic author laid down his 
pen? 



THE PROGEESS OF THE WOELD.i 

1886. 

As at noon every day the captain of a ship tries 
to learn his whereabouts of the sun, that he may 
know how much nearer he is to his destined port,' 
and how far he may have been pushed away from 
his course by the last gale or drifted from it by 
unsuspected currents, so on board this ship of ours, 
The Earth, in which that abstract entity we call 
The World is a passenger, we strive to ascertain, 
from time to time, with such rude instruments as 
we possess, what progress we have made and in 
what direction. It is rather by a kind of dead- 
reckoning than by taking the height of the Sun of 
Righteousness, which should be our seamark, that 
we accomplish this, for such celestial computations 
are gone somewhat out of fashion. It is only a few 
scholars and moralists in their silent and solitary 
observatories that any longer make account of 
them. We mostly put faith in our statisticians, 
and the longer they make their columns of figures, 
the bigger their sums of population, of exports and 
imports, and of the general output of fairy-gold, 

^ This paper was -written for an introduction to a work entitled 
The World^s Progress (published by Messrs. Gately & 0' Gorman, 
Boston), in which the advance in various departments of intel- 
lectual and material activity was described and illustrated. 



THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 161 

the more stupidly are we content. Nor are we 
over-nice in considering the direction of our pro- 
gress, if only we be satisfied that to-day we are no 
longer where we were yesterday. Yet the course 
of this moral thing we call the World is controlled 
by laws as certain and immutable and by influences 
as subtle as those which govern with such exquisite 
precision that of the physical thing we call The 
Earth, could we only find them out. It has ever 
been the business of wise men to trace and to illus- 
trate them, of prudent men to allow for and to seek 
an alliance with them, of good men to conform their 
lives with them. 

Between those observations taken on shipboard 
and ours there is also this other difference, that 
those refer always to a fixed, external standard, 
while for these the standard is internal and fluctu- 
ating, so that the point toward which The World 
is making progress shall seem very different accord- 
ing to the temperament, the fortunes, nay, even the 
very mood or age of the observer. It may be re- 
marked that Mr. Gladstone and Lord Tennyson 
are very far from being at one in their judgment 
of it. Old men in general love not change, and are 
suspicious of it ; while young men are impatient of 
present conditions and of the slowness of movement 
to escape from them. Yet change is the very con- 
dition of our being and thriving, deliberation and 
choice that of all secure foothold on the shaky 
stepping-stones by which we cross the torrent of 
Circumstances. Is it in the power of any man, 
whatever his age, to arrive at that equilibrium of 



162 THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 

temper and judgment without which no even prob- 
able estimate of where we are and whither we are 
tending is possible? Certainly no such trustworthy 
estimate can be deduced from our inward conscious- 
ness or from our outward environments; nor can 
we, with all our statistics, make ourselves independ- 
ent of the inextinguishable lamps of heaven. We 
pile our figures one upon another, even as the 
builders of Babel their bricks, and the heaven we 
hope to attain is as far away as ever. It is moral 
forces that, more than all others, govern the direc- 
tion and regulate the advance of our affairs, and 
these forces are as calculable as the Trade Winds 
or the Gulf Stream. 

And yet, though this be so, one of the greatest 
lessons taught by History is the close relation be- 
tween the moral and the physical well-being of 
man. The case of the Ascetics makes but a seem- 
ing exception to this law, for they voluntarily de- 
nied themselves that bodily comfort which is the 
chief object of human endeavor, and renunciation 
is the wholesomest regimen of the soul. If we 
cannot strike a precise balance and say that the 
World is better because it is richer now than it 
was three centuries, or even half a century, ago, 
we may at least comfort ourselves with the belief 
that this, if not demonstrably true, is more than 
probable, and that there is less curable unhappi- 
ness, less physical suffering, and therefore less 
crime, than heretofore. Yet there is no gain with- 
out corresponding loss. If the sum of happiness 
be greater, yet the amount falling to each of us in 



THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 163 

the division of it seems to be less. It is noteworthy 
that literature, as it becomes more modern, becomes 
also more melancholy, and that he who keeps most 
constantly to the minor key of hopelessness, or 
strikes the deepest note of despair, is surest of at 
least momentary acclaim. Nay, do not some 
sources of happiness flow less full or cease to flow 
as settlement and sanitation advance, even as the 
feeders of our streams are dried by the massacre 
of our forests? We cannot have a new boulevard 
in Florence unless at sacrifice of those ancient city- 
walls in which inspiring memories had for so many 
ages built their nests and reared their broods of 
song. Did not the plague, brooded and hatched 
in those smotherers of fresh air, the slits that thor- 
oughfared the older town, give us the Decameron? 
And was the price too high? We cannot widen 
and ventilate the streets of Rome without grievous 
wrong to the city that we loved, and yet it is well 
to remember that this city too had built itself out 
of and upon the ruins of that nobler Rome which 
gave it all the wizard hold it had on our imagina- 
tion. The Social Science Congress rejoices in 
changes that bring tears to the eyes of the painter 
and the poet. Alas ! we cannot have a world made 
expressly for Mr. Ruskin, nor keep it if we could, 
more 's the pity! Are we to confess, then, that the 
World grows less lovable as it grows more conven- 
ient and comfortable ? that beauty flees before the 
step of the Social Reformer as the wild pensioners 
of Nature before the pioneers? that the lion will lie 
down with the lamb sooner than picturesq^ueness 



164 THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 

with health and prosperity? Morally, no doubt, 
we are bound to consider the Greatest Good of the 
Greatest Number, but there is something in us, va- 
gula, hlandula, that refuses, and rightly refuses, 
to be Benthamized ; that asks itself in a timid whis- 
per, "Is it so certain, then, that the Greatest Good 
is also the Highest? and has it been to the Greatest 
or to the Smallest Number that man has been most 
indebted? " For myself, while I admit, because I 
cannot help it, certain great and manifest improve- 
ments in the general well-being, I cannot stifle a 
suspicion that the Modern Spirit, to whose tune 
we are marching so cheerily, may have borrowed 
of the Pied Piper of Hamelin the instrument 
whence he draws such bewitching music. Having 
made this confession, I shall do my best to write 
in a becoming spirit the Introduction that is asked 
of me, and to make my antiquated portico as little 
unharmonious as I can with the modern building to 
which it leads. 

But, before we enter upon a consideration of the 
Progress of the World, we must take a glance at 
that of the Globe on whose surface what we call 
the World came into being, rests, and has grown 
to what we see. This Globe is not, as we are in- 
formed, a perfect sphere, but slightly flattened at 
the poles ; and in like manner this World is by no 
means a perfect world, though it be not quite so 
easy, as in the other case, to say where or why it is 
not. For it there is no moon-mirror in which to 
study its own profile. Perhaps it would be wise 
to ask ourselves now and then whether the fault 



THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 165 

may not be in the nature of man, after all, rather 
than anywhere else. So far as he is a social ani- 
mal, that is, an animal liable in various ways to 
make his neighbor uncomfortable, it is certainly 
prudent to remember always that, though his nat- 
ural impulses may be restrained, or guided, or even 
improved, yet that they are always there and ready 
to take the bit in their teeth at the first chance which 
offers. This might save us a pretty long bill for 
quack nostrimis, since, though no astronomer has 
ever volunteered to rectify the Earth's outline, 
there is hardly a man who does not fancy that the 
World would become and continue just what it 
should be, if only his patent specific could once be 
fairly tried. Quacks of genius like Rousseau have 
sometimes persuaded to the experiment of their 
panaceas, but always with detriment to the pa- 
tient's constitution. We are long in learning the 
lesson of Medea's cauldron. 

The Earth, fortunately, is beyond the reach of 
our wisdom, and, like the other shining creatures 
of God, whirls her sphere and brings about her 
appointed seasons in happy obedience to laws for 
which she is not responsible and which she cannot 
tinker. Beginning as a nebulous nucleus of fiery 
gases, a luminous thistle-down blown about the 
barren wastes of space, then slowly shrinking, com- 
pacting, growing solid, and cooling at the rind, our 
planet was forced into a system with others like it, 
some smaller, some vastly greater than itself, and, 
in its struggle with overmastering forces, having 
the Moon wrenched from it to be its night-lamp 



166 THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 

and tlie timer of its tides. Then slowly, slowly, it 
became capable of sustaining living organisms, ris- 
ing by long and infinitesimal gradations, symbol- 
ically rehearsed again, it is said, by the child in 
embryo, from the simplest to the more complex, 
from merely animated matter to matter informed 
with Soul, and, in Man, sometimes controlled by 
reason. The imagination grows giddy as it looks 
downwards along the rounds of the ladder lost, 
save a short stretch of it, in distance below, by 
which life has climbed from the zoophyte to Plato, 
to Newton, to Michael Angelo, to Shakespeare. 
During the inconceivable seons implied in these 
processes, the Earth has gone through many vicis- 
situdes, unrecorded save in the gigantic runes of 
Geology, the graffiti of Pluto and Neptune, which 
man, having painfully fashioned a key to them, is 
spelling out letter by letter, arranging as syllables, 
as words, as sentences, and at last reading as co- 
herent narrative. Every one of these records is the 
mortuary inscription of an Epoch or a Cycle, but 
the last word of every one is Hesurgam. They 
point backwards to such endless files of centuries 
that the poor six thousand years of our hieratic 
reckoning are dwindled to a hair -breadth, and our 
students of the rocks and stars, like the drunken 
man of Esdras, disdain the smaller change of tem- 
poral computation, and rattle off their millions as 
carelessly as Congress in dealing with our Na- 
tional strongbox. Nor has this sudden accession 
of secular wealth made them any more careful of 
the humbler interests of their neighbors than it is 



THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 167 

wont to make other nowceaux riches. A malign 
nant astronomer has lately done his best to prove 
that the sun's stock of fuel cannot hold out more 
than seventeen millions of years. Is, then, that 
assurance of an earthly immortality which has hith- 
erto sustained poets through cold and hunger and 
Philistine indifference, to be fobbed off at last with 
so .beggarly a pittance as this? Let us hope for 
better things. 

Though these memories of the rocks and moun- 
tains and ocean -beds seem to belittle and abbreviate 
man, yet it is nothing so; for, till he came, the 
universe, so far as we can explore and know it, had 
neither eyes, nor ears, nor tongue, nor any dimmest 
consciousness of its own being. This antiquity 
has been the gift of modern science; and the brain 
of man has been the hour-glass that gave to these 
regardless sands of Time, running to waste through 
the dreaming fingers of idle Oblivion, the measure 
and standard of their own duration. It is the cun- 
ning of man that has delineated the great dial-plate 
of the heavens; his mind that looks before and 
after, and can tell the unwitting stars where they 
were at any moment of the unmeasured past, where 
they will be at any moment of the unmeasurable fu- 
ture. Though he cannot loose the bands of Orion, 
he can weigh them to the uttermost scruple ; though 
he cannot bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades, 
he knows upon what eyes of mortal men they are 
shed, and at what moment, though by himself un- 
seen. Shut in his study, he can look at the New 
Moon with lovers at the Antipodes. If Science have 



168 THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 

made men seem ephemeral as midges, she has con- 
ferred a great benefit on humanity by endowing 
collective Man with something of that longaeval 
dignity which she has compelled the individual to 
renounce. He is no longer the creature of yester- 
day, but the crowning product and heir of ages so 
countless as to make Time a sharer in the grandeur 
of that immensity to which Astronomy has dilated 
the bounds of Space. And who shall reproach her 
with having put far away from us the homely and 
neighborly heaven of unlettered faith, when she 
has opened such a playground for the outings of 
speculation, and noted in her guide-book so many 
spacious inns for the refreshment of the disembod- 
ied spirit on its travels, so many and so wondrous 
magnalia for its curiosity and instruction? To me 
it seems not unreasonable to find a reinforcement of 
optimism, a renewal of courage and hope, in the 
modern theory that man has mounted to what he is 
from the lowest step of potentiality, through toil- 
some grades of ever-expanding existence, even 
though it have been by a spiral stairway, mainly 
dark or dusty, with loopholes at long intervals 
only, and these granting but a narrow and one-sided 
view. The protoplasmic germ to which it was in- 
calculable promotion to become a stomach, has it 
not, out of the resources with which God had en- 
dowed it, been able to develop the brain of Darwin, 
who should write its biography? Even Theology 
is showing signs that she is getting ready to ex- 
change a man who fell in Adam for a man risen 
out of nonentity and still rising through that aspir- 



THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 169 

ing virtue in his veins whicli is spurred onwards 
and upwards by the very inaccessibility of what he 
sees above him. 

But I have kept Man cooling his heels too long 
in these antechambers of his larger life. He be- 
comes more interesting to us, and we are more will- 
ing to admit his claim of kinship with us, in pro- 
portion as he has entered upon a larger share of 
his inheritance. His condition of nonage and ap- 
prenticeship was unconscionably long; but there 
was no escape, since it was Nature that had drawn 
his indentures. Till he had learned to write,, what 
we seem to know of him is hypothetical merely, 
and he was dull at his pothooks and trammels. 
The book which you have before you enables you 
to see, in brief but siifficient compendium, the ad- 
vances made by mankind in the varioiis lines of 
human enterprise and development, which, leading 
away from a single centre, gradually enlarge the 
circumference of his activity and the horizon of 
his intelligent desires and hopes. We begin with 
Man where our records of him begin, in the rude 
memorials of himself he has unwittingly left us. 
Fancy and conjecture may find ample and instruc- 
tive entertainment if they try to conceive him as he 
was at first, — a dweller in the natural shelter of 
caverns, fashioning, on rainy days, spear-heads and 
arrow-tips of flint, or fishing-hooks of the bones of 
the very prey that was to be their victim. Perhaps 
the need of even a natural roof implies that he had 
already learned, as no other animal has ever learned, 
to cover nature's waterproof suit with some kind 



170 THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 

of clothing. Next, we follow him as he emerges 
from the isolation of Family to the wider relations 
of Tribe, Nation, Community, State. Before even 
the simplest of these latter organizations could be 
possible, he must have invented language ; and this 
could have been no improvisation. Indeed, would 
we conceive how slow his progress must have been, 
we have only to consider the multitude of inven- 
tions, like the wheel, the lever, the bow, the sling, 
every one of which a child now uses — perhaps by 
hereditary instinct — with as little forethought as 
if they were natural limbs. Yet all these and 
countless others waited till a genius came along to 
make them servants of man ; and surely Nature is 
sparing of genius. He was a Kepler who first 
counted the fingers of one hand; he a Galileo who 
added those of the other, and gave us the decimal 
system; he a Newton who divined the possibility 
of numbering his toes also and arriving at the 
score. By and by another great inventor devised 
the tally, and property in flocks and herds, the first 
riches, became secure because numerable and mat- 
ter of record. Nay, if we consider that every man 
we meet walking is a miracle (for it is nothing less 
than this so to evade the law of gravitation as to 
balance himself on one foot at every step), and that 
every infant must give two or three years to the 
acquiring of this art, we shall the more easily rec- 
oncile ourselves with the prolonged periods of prep- 
aration and training which our present civilization 
presupposes. 

Pope has fancied man a pupil of the lower ani- 



THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 171 

mals, learning of the little nautilus to sail ; and no 
doubt it is a fruitful characteristic of man that he 
is clever enough to take and to profit by those nods 
and winks that are thrown away upon the blind 
horses of creation. These, too, — if we are to 
suppose him to stand in need of them, — he is ca- 
pable of expanding and perfecting till the original 
germ be lost in the medley of variation and accre- 
tion. This skill in emendation, this faculty of im- 
proving on his models and achievements, is what 
happily distinguishes him. The bee builds as he 
began in Eden, — a perfect architect from the first, 
— only accommodating the structure of his cells to 
circumstances when he cannot help it. The nau- 
tilus spreads his cobweb sail as the first navigator 
of his race spread his. The tradition of the natural 
caverns in which his ancestor found shelter and 
warmth may have taught the troglodyte to burrow 
in cliffs of softer stone; but the first tree under 
which man sought refuge from a shower must have 
read him a more convincing lecture on the advan- 
tages of a permanent roof than any that Vitruvius 
or Palladio could have furnished him. The first 
tree-trunk he saw floating downstream might well 
be his earliest lesson in shipbuilding; the first 
wooden bowl dropped into the brook by a careless 
girl might suggest to some master mind the advan- 
tage of hollowing the log, to give it buoyancy, bal- 
ance, and capacity. But, from the mere concep- 
tion of shelter, man was beckoned onwards by the 
longing to complete and crown use with beauty, 
till, from the seed of the wattled hovel, sprang at 



172 THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 

last, in supreme loveliness, the Parthenon and the 
Cathedral, in architrave or arch, still filially renew- 
ing the idealized features of the primitive ancestor. 
The rude dugout or coracle of the primaeval mar- 
iner has grown into a palace on the sea, a city on 
the inconstant billows dancing, that carries its 
sails and fair winds in its own entrails, and pushes 
prevailingly against the very breast of the storm. 

Man is the only animal that has given proof of 
invention in the highest sense, that is, not as a 
mere fence against the blasts of discomfort, or as 
a lightener of his drudgery, but as a minister of 
beauty; the only one who of Nature's chains has 
made his ornaments, and of her obstacles the step- 
ping-stones of his advance. Other creatures show, 
or seem to show, pleasure in bright colors, or sen- 
sibility to modulated sounds; but only Man has 
combined and harmonized those into picture and 
these into music. The eye of the ox is a placid mir- 
ror of the meadow into which he gazes, unconscious 
as the dull pool that images the magnificence of 
sky and mountain or the various grace of growth 
upon its borders. The eye of man is a window, 
not to the sense only, but to the soul behind the 
sense ; it has memory and desire, nor will let him 
rest till he have reproduced and made permanent 
some semblance of what engaged his fancy or wak- 
ened his imagination. Even among cave-dwellers, 
we find, scratched on the bones from which they 
had gnawed the flesh, outlines of the mastodon and 
of a combat of stags, — crude endeavors after art, 
deeply suggestive, in their intention, of some im- 



THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 173 

possible Snyders or Landseer beguiling the im- 
pulse he could neither stifle nor satisfy. 

Though he cannot create, man reflects the Cre- 
ative Power through his sense of Form, Order, and 
Proportion, — the abstractions by which that Power 
is most vividly manifested. He has the supreme 
faculty of organization. Multiply the bison in- 
definitely, and the result is still a herd : multiply 
man, and he organizes himself, arranging himself, 
more or less rudely, by some process of moral 
gravitation, in a form of polity, or groping clum- 
sily in search thereof ; he cannot long remain mob, 
even if he would. Other creatures are endowed 
with that kind of crystallized reason which we call 
instinct. In the highest types of man alone does 
reason continue ductile and versatile, enabling him 
to supplement or multiply his natural organs and 
powers by artificial contrivances, and thus to real- 
ize the dreams and fables of his remote progeni- 
tors. We write no more fairy tales, because the 
facts of our every-day lives are more full of mar- 
vel than they. Other creatures have curiosity; 
but it stops short in the vagueness of wonder, nor 
pushes on, like that of man, to discovery. Other 
animals stare; man looks. Many are gregarious, 
some social, and some — as ants, bees, and beavers 
— dwell in communities and socialize their labor; 
man only has devised a society which, imperfect in 
many ways and wasteful as it is, contains within 
itself the elements of growth and amelioration. It 
is a suggestive fact that, within the historic period, 
no new animal has been tamed to the service or 



174 THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 

companionship of man. Only he can record his 
memory, and so fund his experience for the benefit 
of his posterity; only he is capable of being bored, 
— the sharpest spur to enterprise, to action, to the 
contempt of life. Captaincy among the lower ani- 
mals means superior strength and the cheap courage 
that comes of it : among men it means brains, it 
means, above all, character; and they have con- 
trived, by making Law supreme, to make all men 
alike strong. Dogs know when they have done 
wrong, but their moral standard is the displeasure 
of their master ; man has invented, or, at any rate, 
developed, conscience, — the only infallible detec- 
tive, the only impeccable judge, the only execu- 
tioner with whom no reprieve avails. The endeavor 
has been made to distinguish man from the brutes 
by defining him as the only animal that laughs, 
that has learned the uses of fire, and what not. 
We might be tempted to call him the only animal 
who thinks he is thinking when he is merely rumi- 
nating. But I conceive his truer and higher dis- 
tinction to be that he alone has the gift, or, rather, 
is laid under the ennobling necessity, of conceiv- 
ing and formulating an ideal; which means that he 
alone may be the servant and steward of the Divine 
Beauty. 

In these volumes the reader will find all that he 
can reasonably wish to know about prehistoric or 
historic man, and about the floating globe on which 
he dwells, treated at sufficient length by competent 
persons, each dealing with that part of the subject 
to which his special studies had been devoted. 



THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 175 

He will learn how far and in what directions man 
has advanced, how much of his inheritance he has 
subdued and occupied, and with what results. He 
will learn what is meant by the familiar phrase 
that man is "the heir of all the ages," and how 
nobly exacting are the duties and privileges implied 
in it. He will observe how certain races have 
been endowed with special qualities and aptitudes; 
as, the Greeks for art, in its most widely inclusive 
sense; the Jews, for commerce and (strange para- 
dox) for the higher divinations of the soul; the 
Romans, for civil and military administration; 
our own, for polity and the planting of colonies. 
He will trace back astronomy to Chaldaea, theog- 
ony to Babylonia, and metaphysical speculation to 
India. In certain directions he will find no ad- 
vance, as in literature and sculpture, since the 
Greeks ; in ethics, since the Sermon on the Mount. 
He will see some races that have been seemingly 
able to spin a civilization, as the spider his web, 
out of their own entrails, and yet none that has 
not borrowed, few which have not a tradition that 
the seeds of culture were brought to them from 
abroad. This will lead him to think how large a 
part commerce must have had in the civilizing 
process, and that, before commerce was possible, 
communities must have existed of sufficient dura- 
tion and stability to produce more than they could 
consume, and therefore to desire profitable ex- 
changes. It should be encouraging, then, to see, 
as we now see, the carrier-doves of commerce 
spreading their white wings over every ocean and 



176 THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 

every land-locked sea. For, if they sometimes 
bear with them the germs of contagious social evils, 
they bear also those of good; and we should de- 
spair of humanity did we not believe that these 
strike a deeper and more enduring root, till they 
crowd out their noxious rivals and occupy all the 
soil. But if the adventurer into strange lands too 
often carry darkness with him, he seldom fails to 
bring back light ; for nothing is more certain than 
that the mind widens with its wider circuit, and is 
liberalized by contact with various races, religions, 
and forms of civilization. It was said of old, "Men 
shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be in- 
creased." We have a striking instance of this in 
the Crusaders, who, though they did not realize 
their dream of permanent conquest, came home, if 
not more human, at least more cosmopolitan, which 
is a long stride towards becoming so, and unwit- 
tingly brought with them the seeds of that freer 
thinking which slowly conquered for Man that 
freedom to think which was to emancipate Europe 
and make America possible. But we should al- 
ways bear in mind the wise saying of Goethe, that 
"whatever emancipates our minds without giving 
us the mastery of ourselves is destructive." And, 
if Commerce have enriched us in many ways, both 
spiritually and materially, I cannot let it go with- 
out a sigh for the sentimental wrong it has uncon- 
sciously done us in bringing about that prosaic uni- 
formity in the costume, both of mind and body, 
which unhappily distinguishes the modern from 
that ancient world, to print whose obituary, one 



THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 111 

might say, was the first employment of Guten- 
berg's types. 

If the history of the world show us Man slowly 
rising to a higher conception and more adequate 
fulfilment of his destiny, it also shows us the sadder 
spectacle of empires that have perished and noAv 
lie buried under the decay of their own monuments. 
Worse than this, it shows us that higher forms of 
civilization may be overwhelmed and supplanted by 
lower forms; that some families of men, like the 
pure negro, are incapable of civilization from their 
own resources, and relapse into savagery when left 
to themselves, as in Hayti. Nay, members even 
of the higher and more self-sufficing races are 
never beyond danger of this relapse when the 
wholesome influences and restraints of organized 
society are withdrawn. Examples of this are only 
too common; as, in armies after a rout, in great 
cities under the paralysis of pestilence, and in the 
mutineers of the Bounty. The last instance sup- 
plies us also with a consoling illustration of the 
force of hereditary impulse and the value of char- 
acter; since the sole survivor, John Adams, was 
able, with the Bible behind him, to piece together 
again the fragments of society into a patriarchal 
community that revived the legend of Arcadia. 
The fact that civilization is, after all, built on so 
sandy a foundation as the nature of man, that it 
is exposed to all the storms that lie in wait for the 
fortunes of man, should make us more sensible of 
that duty of unremitting vigilance which is needful 
for its safeguard. 



178 THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 

In casting tlie figure of tlie World's future, 
many new elements, many disturbing forces, must 
be taken into account. First of all is Democracy, 
which, within the memory of men yet living, has 
assimied almost the privilege of a Law of Nature, 
and seems to be making constant advances towards 
universal dominion. Its ideal is to substitute the 
interest of the many for that of the few as the test 
of what is wise in polity and administration, and 
the opinion of the many for that of the few as the 
rule of conduct in public affairs. That the inter- 
est of the many is the object of whatever social or- 
ganization man has hitherto been able to effect 
seems unquestionable; whether their opinions are 
so safe a guide as the opinions of the few, and 
whether it will ever be possible, or wise if possible, 
to substitute the one for the other in the hegemony 
of the World, is a question still open for debate. 
Whether there was ever such a thing as a Social 
Contract or not, as has been somewhat otiosely 
discussed, this, at least, is certain, — that the basis 
of all Society is the putting of the force of all at 
the disposal of all, by means of some arrangement 
assented to by all, for the protection of all, and this 
under certain prescribed forms. This has always 
been, consciously or unconsciously, the object for 
which men have striven, and which they have more 
or less clumsily accomplished. The State — some 
established Order of Things, under whatever name 
— has always been, and must always be, the su- 
premely important thing ; because in it the interests 
of all are invested, by it the duties of all imposed 



THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 179 

and exacted. In point of fact, though it be often 
strangely overlooked, the claim to any selfish he- 
reditary privilege because you are born a man is as 
absurd as the same claim because you are born a 
noble. In a last analysis, there is but one natural 
right; and that is the right of superior force. This 
primary right, having been found unworkable in 
practice, has been deposited, for the convenience 
of all, with the State, from which, as the maker, 
guardian, and executor of Law, and as a common 
fund for the use of all, the rights of each are de- 
rived, and man thus made as free as he can be 
without harm to his neighbor. It was this sur- 
render of private jurisdiction which made civiliza- 
tion possible, and keeps it so. The abrogation of 
the right of private war has done more to secure 
the rights of man, properly understood, — and, 
consequently, for his well-being, — than all the 
theories spun from the brain of the most subtle 
speculator, who, finding himself cramped by the 
actual conditions of life, fancies it as easy to make 
a better world than God intended, as it has been 
proved difficult to keep in running order the world 
that man has made out of his fragmentary concep- 
tion of the divine thought. The great peril of de- 
mocracy is, that the assertion of private right should 
be pushed to the obscuring of the superior obliga- 
tion of public duty. 

The pluralizing in his single person, by the Ed- 
itor of the Newspaper, of the offices once divided 
among the Church, the University, and the Courts 
of Law, is ohe of the most striking phenomena of 



180 THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 

modern times in democratized countries, and is 
calculated to inspire thoughtful men with some 
distrust. Such pretension to omniscience and to 
the functions it involves has not been seen since 
the days of Voltaire, and even he never aspired to 
anything beyond the privilege of issuing his own 
private notes and not the bonds on which the credit 
of the Universe depends. The Church, the Uni- 
versity, and the Courts taught at least luider the 
guidance of some extrinsic standard of Authority, 
or of Experience, or of Tradition, but what may 
be the outcome of a world edited subjectively every 
morning is matter of alarming conjecture. Anon- 
ymousness also evades responsibility. But it is 
encouraging to note that the higher type of editor 
is coming every day to a fuller sense of the mean- 
ing of his many-sided calling, and that the news- 
paper itself is really beginning to furnish an in- 
structive epitome of contemporary culture in all its 
branches, which, if it cannot supply the place of 
more thorough and special training, may inspire in 
some an appetite for it, and prevent others from 
suffering, so much as they otherwise might, by the 
want of it. Moreover, the power to influence pub- 
lic opinion is cumulative, gathering slowly but 
surely to the abler and more scrupulous conductors 
of the press, and it is observable that Wisdom 
generally comes to stay, while Error is apt to be 
but a transitory lodger. 

Another very serious factor in the problem of 
the future is Socialism. This, it is true, is no 
novel phenomenon. Its theory, at least, must have 



THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 181 

been dimly conceived by the first man who had lit- 
tle and wanted more, and who found Society guilty 
of the shortcomings whose cause may have been 
mainly in himself. Nay, there is dynamite enough 
in the New T'estament, if illegitimately applied, 
to blow all our existing institutions to atoms. All 
well-meaning and humane men sympathize with 
the aims of Lasalle and Karl Marx. All thought- 
ful men see well-founded and insuperable difficul- 
ties in the way of their accomplishment. But the 
socialism of the closet is a very different thing 
from that of hordes of unthinking men to whom 
universal suffrage may give the power of unmaking 
Order by making Laws. Our federal system gives 
us a safeguard, however, that is wanting in more 
centralized governments. Should one State choose 
to make the experiment of mending its watch by 
taking out the mainspring, the others can meanwhile 
look on and take warning by the result. We have 
already observed a movement towards the intro- 
duction of socialistic theories into both State and 
National legislation, though, if History teach any- 
thing, it teaches that the true function of Govern- 
ment is the prevention and remedy of evils so far 
only as these depend on causes within the reach of 
law, and that it has lost any proper conception of 
its duty when it becomes a distributor of alms. 
Timid people dread the insurrection of Bone and 
Sinew without seeing that unwise concessions to 
their unreasoned demands, which include the right 
to revive private war, will lead inevitably to the 
revolt of Brain, with consequences far more disas- 



182 THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 

trous to the liberties so painfully won in all the 
ages during which man has been visible to us. 
When men formed their first Society, they instinct- 
ively recognized, in the Priest, the Lawgiver, or 
the Great Captain, the supreme fact that Intellect 
is the divinely appointed lieutenant of God in the 
government of this World, and in the ordering of 
man's place in it and of his relations towards it. 
This viceroy may be deposed, as during the drunk- 
enness of the French Revolution, but out of the 
very crime will arise the Avenger. 

It has seemed to some, and those not the least 
wise of their generation, that the advance of Sci- 
ence on which we so much plume ourselves was no 
unmixed good, and that this seemingly gracious 
benefactress perhaps took away with one hand as 
much as she gave with the other. We are not yet 
in a position to compute the results of its influence 
in modifying human thought and action. That 
it may be great none doubt who are capable of 
forming a judgment ; and, if long life were for any 
reason a desirable thing, I can conceive of none 
more valid than that it might be prolonged till 
some of these results could be classed and tabulated. 
I cannot share their fears who are made unhappy 
by the foreboding that Science is in some unex- 
plained way to take from us our sense of spirit- 
ual things. What she may do is to forbid our 
vulgarizing them by materialistic conceptions of 
their nature; and in this she will be serving the 
best interests of Truth and of mankind also. For 
it is Man's highest distinction and safeguard that 



THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 183 

he cannot if he would rest satisfied till he have 
pushed to its full circumference whatever fragmen- 
tary arc of truth he has been able to trace with 
the compasses of his mind. Give to Science her 
undisputed prerogative in the realm of matter, and 
she must become, whether she will or no, the trib- 
utary of Faith. Inmsibilia enim ipsius [Dei] a 
creatura mundi per ea quce facta sunt intellecta. 
Whatever else Science may accomplish, she will 
never contrive to make all men equally tall in body 
or mind. By labor-saving expedients she may 
multiply every man's hands by fifty, but she can 
never find a substitute for the planning and direct- 
ing head ; nor, though she abolish space and time, 
can she endow electricity and vibration with the 
higher functions of soul. The more she makes one 
lobe of the brain Aristotelian, so much more will 
the other intrigue for an invitation to the banquet 
of Plato. Theology will find out in good time that 
there is no atheism at once so stupid and so harm- 
ful as the fancying God to be afraid of any know- 
ledge with which He has enabled Man to equip 
himself. Should the doctrines of Natural Selec- 
tion, Survival of the Fittest, and Heredity be ac- 
cepted as Laws of Nature, they must profoundly 
modify the thought of men and, consequently, their 
action. But we should remember that it is the 
privilege and distinction of man to mitigate natural 
laws, and to make them his partners if he cannot 
make them his servants. Human nature is too ex- 
pansive a force to be safely bottled up in any sci- 
entific formula, however incontrovertible. 



184 THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 

I should be glad to speculate also on the effect 
of the tendency of population towards great cities; 
no new thing, but intensified as never before by- 
increased and increasing ease of locomutation. 
The evil is intensified by the fact that this migra- 
tion is recruited much more largely from the help- 
less than from the energetic class of the rural pop- 
ulation; and it is not only an evil but a danger 
where, as with us, suffrage has no precautionary 
limits. If no remedy be possible, a palliative 
shovild be sought in whatever will make the coun- 
try more entertaining; as in village libraries that 
may turn solitude into society, and in a more thor- 
ough and intelligent teaching of natural history in 
our public schools. The ploughman who is also a 
naturalist runs his furrow through the most inter- 
esting museum in the world. To discuss the cohe- 
sive or disruptive forces of Race and of Nationality 
might tempt me still to linger, but I have kept the 
reader quite long enough from the book itself. I 
have barelj?^ touched on several points on which it 
has roused or quickened thought. So far as the 
material prosperity of mankind is concerned, the 
review is by no means discomforting, and as I am 
one of those who believe that only when the bodily 
appetites of man are satisfied, does he become first 
conscious of a spiritual hunger and thirst that de- 
mand quite other food to appease them, so we may 
say, with some confidence, sicut patrihus erit Deus 
nobis. 



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